About QueensWest.com
Why the site started, how it worked, and how it said goodbye.
“In 1997, after months of reading the Long Island City Webboard (LICWEB) (a place where current and future "residents" of Citylights were searching for any and all information on the building, prices, dates etc) and in going through the process of purchasing at Citylights myself I decided that there was an "informational need." That lead to what you see before you, the humble QueensWest.com.”
“The reason it is QueensWest.com and not Citylights.com or some other URL that is more building specific is because I wanted to have the site be able to grow and expand as the new buildings were built and those prospective tenants have questions that need answering.”
– Jake, the About page (wording used 2007–2011; earlier versions date to 1999)
QueensWest.com was built and run by its founder, Jason Atwood, who signed his posts “Jake.” Over fifteen years it offered:
- Building sections with FAQs, maps and picture galleries (Citylights, Avalon Riverview, Gantry Park, EastCoast, PowerHouse)
- Discussion boards for each building and the neighborhood, later “The Lounge”
- Polls, a local business directory, classifieds, a calendar and local weather
- Neighborhood news and the yearly pub crawl
The forums, read-only: the discussion boards are back as a read-only archive (1998–2013), recovered from the site’s own 2013 database: about 7,800 threads and 50,000 posts. Posts appear under the usernames people chose. Email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, profile links and contact signatures are removed, and there are no member profiles or private messages. Nobody can post or log in. The forum archive is kept out of search engines.
What is not here: the classified ads, member profiles, member lists and account records. Unmoderated posts that never appeared on the site (mostly spam) are left out too. Posters, or people mentioned in a post, can ask for it to be removed: contact@longislandcity.info.
“QueensWest.com Says Goodbye”
“Sadly, the Queenswest.com website is closed after more than 15 years in operation. Back when I built the site in 1998 as a resource for all Queens West and Long Island City residents, there was no Twitter, no Facebook and very few other places to find information or talk about the happenings in the neighborhood. Now the number of blogs, Facebook pages and internal building websites have fulfilled those needs and I regrettably don't have time to keep up with the exploding amount of content or the updates.”
“It has been a pleasure to build, maintain and be a part of the community and hopefully that is mutual.”
– Jake (old school webmaster)
Rebuilt in 2026 from Jason’s own QueensWest.com folders (pages, flyers, logos, screenshots, rate sheets, polls), the site’s 2013 Plone database export (the forums, news, the calendar, the FAQ, the business directory and the original building pages), and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to fill gaps. Every page cites where its text came from. Newspaper articles are cited; the 1980 New York magazine scan and the few newspaper page images that QueensWest.com itself posted are shown as history, credited to their publishers. Personal correspondence, member data and advertiser records are left out.
Corrections and removal requests: contact@longislandcity.info.
The site’s own privacy policy from 2007 is kept as history.