Ian Applegate

In 2010, I made a wrong turn on my way to a Mets game and came across a neighborhood with no paved roads and only above-ground utilities, full of cars stacked on top of cars and buildings made of scrap metal. Doing some research, I discovered this was one of the most underdeveloped neighborhoods in all of New York City. It had been the city's biggest open market scrap yard. I went there to find out more about the neighborhood and interviewed a few of the people who knew the neighborhood well. In the years since I filmed this, the neighborhood has diminished in size to a much lesser amount of space than it used to be, but there are still some traces of the mess that it once was.