Long Island City skyline across East River
— — the towers Queens grew when nobody was looking.
Not only on a wall.
“The skyline that wasn't there twenty years ago. Hunters Point in Queens, looking back at Manhattan from the Pepsi-Cola sign that has marked this stretch of the East River since 1940. Skyline Tower now rises above One Court Square. Gantry Plaza State Park keeps the old rail cranes where the freight used to land.
Long Island City skyline across East River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Long Island City sits on the western edge of Queens, directly across the East River from midtown Manhattan, with the United Nations and the Chrysler Building lined up on the far bank. The neighborhood was an industrial waterfront for most of the twentieth century; freight gantries from the Long Island Rail Road still stand at Gantry Plaza State Park. Since the 2001 rezoning the skyline has grown vertically. Skyline Tower, completed in 2021 at 778 feet, is the tallest building in Queens, and One Court Square holds 658 feet.
The East River is not a river but a tidal strait connecting Upper New York Bay to Long Island Sound. The current reverses roughly every six hours and runs harder than most visitors expect; this is the water that drowned the General Slocum in 1904 a mile north at Hell Gate. The Queens shore reads quieter than the Manhattan side because the working piers were paved into parkland in the 1990s. Cargo ferries still pass under the Queensboro Bridge before dawn.
The classic vantage is from Gantry Plaza State Park in Hunters Point, or one stop further up at Hunter's Point South Park, both reachable by the 7 train from Grand Central in under fifteen minutes. The Pepsi-Cola sign, designated a New York City landmark in 2016, faces Manhattan and reads cleanest at blue hour. The NYC Ferry running between Manhattan and Long Island City stops at the Hunters Point pier and offers a low-water vantage the parks do not.