Few neighborhoods in New York have grown quite as dramatically over the past 20 years as the Queens enclave of Long Island City. Once a waterfront industrial neighborhood, its easy access to Manhattan and room to grow as industry faded away has led to dozens of modern high-rise residential buildings, offices and nearly a second headquarters for Amazon. Long Island City was also the founding site for FreshDirect, a remnant of its warehouse-heavy past, but even it has since moved away.
All that new growth has yielded lots of new restaurants and retail but relatively few supermarkets, making a target-rich market for Monrovia, Calif.-based Trader Joe’s, which opened June 25 on busy Jackson Avenue, between the Court Square subway and the MOMA PS1 museum.
What follows are photo from the grand opening.