HERE COMES THE NEIGHBORHOOD.(drop off point for released prisoners to move from Queens Plaza)(Brief Article)

COMMENT

DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS

CHIANTI POSTCARD

THE CREATIVE LIFE

BIG NIGHT

For as long as anyone can remember (that is, about seventeen years), a busload of inmates newly released from Rikers Island has been dropped off each weekday morning on a street corner in Long Island City, Queens. At around 5 A.M., a school bus, colored Department of Corrections orange-white-and-blue, pulls up to a discount furniture store on Jackson Avenue and delivers fifty or so rough-looking gentlemen into the predawn squalor of Queens Plaza South. They tumble to the sidewalk carrying garbage bags full of their belongings and scatter quickly. Some head for the No. 7 train (or the W, F, N, R, V, or G), others for a nearby twenty-four-hour doughnut shop, still others for idling cars occupied by family members or friends, and a few for the long-anticipated comforts of prostitutes, who, despite a crackdown called Operation Clean Sweep, move in and out of the shadows beneath the Queensboro Bridge.

Queens Plaza is braided, like a sub-Arctic river, and difficult to navigate; there seem to be a lot of streets and little traffic islands. It is bisected by the ramp of the bridge and is surrounded on all sides by strip clubs (thirteen in all), with such names as Venus and Scandals, which means that there are as many livery cars as cop cars there. It is a befuddling and dismal place, especially if you're on foot, at five in the morning--though it's ideal, in its way, for the savoring of new freedoms.