Don’t Believe Their Lies!

After initial indications that they would stay, the facts on the ground are otherwise and the smokestacks on the Pennsylvania Railroad Generating Plant in Hunters Point are coming down:

The much-watched saga of the fate of four smokestacks atop a former power plant in Long Island City, Queens, has a resolution: they are coming down.

Despite a neighborhood campaign to preserve the smokestacks, they will make way for a developer’s glass and aluminum tower, which will form a residential complex when combined with the 1909 power plant, the onetime Pennsylvania Railroad Power Station.

“We had no choice but to look for a different design,” said Cheskel Schwimmer of CGS Builders, the developer. Mr. Schwimmer said he originally had hoped to incorporate the smokestacks into his design, constructing a glass cube between them. “But the city did not approve it,” he said. “We had to look at other options.”

In the neighborhood, where the smokestacks’ plight has sparked debate for months, Mr. Schwimmer’s opponents are not pleased.

“I think it’s sad,” said Paul Parkhill, co-director of the educational group Place in History, who participated in a postcard campaign seeking landmark status for the plant. “It sort of underscores the fact that the city doesn’t do a good job of protecting industrial buildings, especially in the outer boroughs.”

Nevertheless, some residents were not particularly disheartened.

“There are mixed feelings in the neighborhood between newer residents and people who are second or third generation here,” said Joseph Conley, chairman of Community Board 2. “The artists, the newer arrivals in the neighborhood, they tend to be the preservationists.”

But any dispute has been silenced by the scaffolding covering each of the stacks. At last look, one was already halfway gone.