(Morrell Smith, 1925-27) Colloquially known as the “Long Island City Clock Tower,” this neo-Gothic style building was designated as a New York City Individual Landmark in 2015, but it is a landmark in every sense of the word. Standing at 14 stories tall, the structure was Queens’ tallest until the construction of the Citigroup Building at One Court Square in 1990. Its location in one of the borough’s busiest transportation hubs has made the building a prominent fixture. Queensboro Bridge Plaza (now Queens Plaza) became an important commercial center after the 1909 completion of the Queensboro Bridge and the construction of numerous elevated transit lines that converged here. The Manhattan Company, founded by Aaron Burr in 1799 and a precursor to J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., merged with the Bank of Long Island in 1920 and established 40 branches in Queens over the next decade. This building, located in the heart of the borough, would be a showpiece for the company. Its grand, 14-foot diameter, the four-faced clock has provided subway riders with a time check on their commute to work for roughly 90 years. The clock tower itself occupies the top three stories of the building. When it opened in 1927, the Bank of the Manhattan Company occupied the basement, ground floor, and mezzanine, and the rest of the building was rented as office space. The banking hall’s interior, finished in marble with brass hardware throughout, remains largely intact, though covered in gypsum wallboard. The exterior is clad in buff brick with limestone trim, and its verticality is emphasized by bands of contrasting brick that draw the eye to the highly ornate clock tower. In addition to the clock faces, this section features reliefs of the god Oceanus, a symbol of the bank, and monograms of the bank’s initials, as well as a crenelated roofline.

The Metropolitan Building, located at 27-42 Thomson Avenue, was home to the Zeese Wilkinson Company from 1921 until 1950. The company was listed in an advertisement in the "American Printer" on June 20th, 1922, stating that the company occupied "115,000 square feet of floor space...in the 5th and 6th floors of the new Metropolitan Building." The company closed in 1950. The Metropolitan Building, now called the "Arris Lofts" is presently a luxury residential building.

Standing at 27-28 Thomson Avenue, the triangular Arris Lofts was originally constructed as an industrial building. Typical for a factory building, the façade is unadorned but dominated by large windows that provided plenty of natural light for the interior workspace. This eight-story, poured concrete structure was one of six Eagle Electric warehouses in Long Island City, producing electrical switches and other equipment and gaining notoriety for its billboards proclaiming that “Perfection Is Not An Accident.” Later, the building served as the MetLife printing plant before its conversion to luxury apartments in 2008. Architect Costas Kondylis was hired to transform this loft space into 237 luxury apartments while retaining the building’s original industrial feel.

Pan American Airways Building,1946. The large Jet Blue rooftop sign that currently graces a nearby building was not the first airline logo to top a Long Island City building. During the middle part of the 20th century Pan-Am, whose logo more memorably topped the building just north of Grand Central Terminal, also occupied a building on Queens Plaza. The building seen here in 1946 does not include the rooftop sign which was installed c.1960.

The Long Island City Courthouse was constructed between 1872 and 1876, more than two decades before Queens became a part of the Greater New York City. The French Second Empire style building was designed by a Massachusetts architect named George Hathorne. Suffering the fate of many 19th century buildings, the structure was ravaged by fire in 1904. Between 1904 and 1908 it was completely redesigned by local Queens architect Peter M. Coco who stripped the exterior of much of its ornamentation and added two stories and two entranceway columns to create a neo-Classical courthouse. (The resulting building is seen here in 1932 and remains the same today.)

(Peter M. Coco, 1904-1908) In the late 19th century, the county seat was relocated to Long Island City, which was emblematic of the area’s increasing importance as an independent municipality that boasted its own public school system, regular police force and pure water supply. The new county seat was located in a two-story, French Second Empire building on Court Square, a prominent place in the growing city. Unfortunately, the structure was gutted by a fire in 1904, so a new building was commissioned from architect Peter Coco. A graduate of Cooper Union, Coco designed the building in the neo-English Renaissance style, incorporating many interesting details, such as the pairs of eagles set above cartouches around the third story. When the boroughs were consolidated in 1898, Long Island City lost its status as the county seat to Jamaica, yet the courthouse remained in use as the county courthouse until being taken over for use by the state’s Supreme Court in 1932. This dignified four-story building has remained a focal point for judicial activity in Queens for over a century, serving as the site of many notable trials, including that of Ruth Brown Snyder and Henry Judd Gray, who were famously executed at Sing Sing Prison in 1928 after being convicted in the murder of Snyder’s husband, Albert Snyder. The trial was widely publicized and large crowds gathered outside the courthouse for the verdict on May 9, 1927.