The water of Flushing Bay was placid on an unseasonably warm mid-December weekday, rippling just softly with the gentle breeze.
“On a typical weekend practice, unless we’re expecting a storm, the waters are pretty much calm like this,” said Winston Liao, 39, as he looked out from Pier 1 of the World’s Fair Marina, where four geese took advantage of the dragon boaters’ off-season to enjoy the quiet bay.
In this northeastern pocket of Queens, the choppy flow of the East River is cordoned off by LaGuardia Airport to the left and, to the right, a concrete plant and marine transfer station where the sanitation department ships up to 4,300 tons of trash a day out of the city.
“That’s why we call it one of the safest open bodies of water for dragon boats,” Liao, a coach of the special boating sport, continued, explaining the dangers his team and its fair-weathered, human-powered craft would have to endure in rougher wakes elsewhere. “If this was like a Saturday or Sunday, I’m sure our head coach would’ve been like, ‘Alright guys, let’s go practice, let’s get whatever water time we have left.’”
These days, the marina’s 1,200-member dragon boat community is urgently searching for a new base, as the Parks Department in late November notified them that “access to the pier will no longer be possible upon the conclusion of the 2024-2025 season,” according to an email obtained by THE CITY.
This closure, dragon boaters say, will displace them from the bay for possibly a decade or even longer, splitting up a community of roughly 20 clubs and 60 teams as each scramble to find new accommodations in a city where public access to suitable waters is limited.
A shabby white shack, which once housed the pier’s snack concession and bathroom, has already been mostly off limits since 2016, when an inspection revealed widespread degradation to its structure, which was built for the 1937 World’s Fair and extensively damaged by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
While the Parks Department has, in the eight years since, constructed a series of floating docks to enable dragon boaters to continue practicing multiple times a week, that “temporary solution was deemed to no longer be viable” in November, said Judd Faulkner, a department spokesperson.
“Due to significant deterioration of Pier 1, NYC Parks closed the adjoining temporary docks out of concern for public safety,” he added. “NYC Parks has worked closely with the dragon boating community for decades, and we remain committed to providing safe, dedicated dockage space with accessible dock fees for recreational boaters,” noting that dragon boating has been “a fixture of Flushing Bay.”
Now, boaters and their crafts must vacate from the dilapidated docks by the end of April — right at the beginning of prime practice time. Most competitive racers had planned to return to practice for Team USA tryouts in the spring and for championships around the country and the world.
“I think the dragon boat community has always hoped that someone would come in and get the pier fixed or replaced, and everyone knew in the back of their mind that eventually we would get to this conversation,” said Liao, a coach and steerer for the Metro Athletic Dragons team. “But it has always been one of those ‘next year may be the last year’ things — every single year we say ‘next year may be the last year.’
“Now they’re actually doing something about it.”
While improvements to the pier are welcome, the grief is palpable, too. The pier’s closure, Liao said, now endangers the survival and vitality of the city’s three-decade-old dragon boat community — made up of many Chinese Americans who find connection to their heritage through the storied sport with lore that traces back 2,500 years.
In much of China — where the Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated as a national public holiday — children still learn in school about the legend of drum-beating fishermen, who thrashed their paddle into the water and fed rice dumplings called zongzi to fish.
As the legend goes, the zongzis and the drumming were to deter the fish from gorging on the body of a famed poet, who had thrown himself into the river as his state was being invaded amid a Zhou dynasty–era war.
Today, the tradition has evolved into an international water sport that in New York City has drawn in former crew rowers, kayakers, cancer survivors and corporate teambuilders alike. Even city agencies, including the Parks Department, are represented by its own team, the Olmsted Dragons, made up of landscape architects, foresters, engineers and planners.
“It certainly gave me a chance to meet literally hundreds of coworkers from different parts of the firm that I would’ve never met otherwise,” said Paul Caviano, a 64-year-old retired compliance officer who competes on the Morgan Stanley corporate dragon boat team. “We’re very nervous and unsettled about what’s happening.”
Political Teamwork
Robert Moses — the former Parks commissioner and power broker responsible for building the now-deteriorated marina located within Flushing Meadows Corona Park — once envisioned the waterfront facility as “the boatsman’s gateway to the city” and “another example of successful Federal, State, City … and private cooperation.”
Now, decades later, the survival of this tottering pier beloved by dragon boaters seems, too, tethered to the whims of this web of political relationships.
City capital funding and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has specifically earmarked $18.4 million and $3.81 million for Pier 1, respectively, Faulkner noted, including $2.4 million announced a year after Sandy, but “a full reconstruction of Pier 1 is not fully funded at this time.”
Parks, however, has yet to determine the total cost of the project, he added, as “additional scope needs to be reevaluated”,. Currently, a total of nearly $35 million in construction funding is available for the entire marina, which also includes Pier 3.
The LaGuardia Airport AirTrain plan from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was supposed to bring “significant upgrades” to the 1.4-mile waterfront promenade, including a relocation and reconstruction of Pier 1, which Faulkner said expanded the scope of the project. But that AirTrain plan was abandoned entirely last year.
Parks officials say they will only be able to provide a timeline for completing the work when additional funding has been coordinated.
In the meantime, a report from the Mayor’s Office of Management & Budget published last November estimated that “future replacements” for the marina’s floating dock would come in the 2030s, while plans for replacing other aspects of the pier stretch as far out as the 2050s.
Some dragon boaters, like Liao, now hope that Mets owner Steve Cohen would bring in funding to expedite the pier project as a part of his Metropolitan Park casino bid, located just by the water. Liao said he’s testified at a hearing for the bid at the local community board, and more recently, at the Queens Borough President’s public hearing on the proposal, advocating for investments to the pier as a way to bring back water transportation to the rapidly developing Willets Point neighborhood.
“Unlike other people, I didn’t focus on what that 50 acres is about.,” Liao said, referring to the Mets parking lot where Cohen intends to build the casino. “I’m talking about this. That’s my goal — because so long as you have a stable pier, the dragon boat community remains.”
Maybe one day, he dreamed as he walked through the facility with THE CITY recently, the marina might even become home to a world-caliber competition for the growing sport, alongside the Mets stadium, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and the incoming soccer stadium.
Others, however, remain skeptical of Cohen’s plan.
“What Community Board 7 was told repeatedly, and potentially other community boards, is that they are not looking at the promenade. They are not looking at Pier 1 — they’re focused south of it,” said Rebecca Pryor, executive director of Guardians of Flushing Bay, an organization originally founded by a coalition of dragon boaters, which has emerged as one of Cohen’s most vocal foes over the last few years. “That should ring an alarm bell for folks.”
On the other hand, 74-year-old Good Jean Lau, a long-time dragon boater who’s been protesting Cohen’s casino with the Guardians, said she would be open to supporting the project if they were to commit to caring for the waterway.
“We’re in jeopardy of not having a place to practice,” said Lau. “I’m even looking at Home Depot — they’re right in front of a waterway, and I’m willing to walk over there to negotiate with Home Depot.”
“So yes, we are open for negotiations,” Lau said. “And we’re gonna do it peacefully. I will not carry any protest signs this time.”
Cohen’s $8 billion blueprint currently includes a $163 million pledge for a “community impact trust” that’s supposed to help with upkeep and improvements for Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
Karl Rickett, a spokesperson for Metropolitan Park, said it will continue working with the dragon boat community to “help find a solution,” and that the Cohen project “hasn’t ruled out helping fund waterfront improvements.”
In the meantime, parks has provided boaters with a list of 36 alternative marinas in the city, both public and private. A few dragon boat teams, Faulkner said, have already arranged for docking space at some of these sites.
But not Ben Chan, head coach of the Metro Athletics Dragon. His team is still weighing its options and scrambling for affordable solutions for the 2025 season.
“Financially, the public ones are probably our only alternative at this point,” Chan said. But dockage space in many Parks-run marina can’t be guaranteed, he said, as some are already at capacity while others like the Bayside Marina are currently under reconstruction.
“We made some initial calls to one or two of the private ones on the list, and they’re anywhere in the north of $9,000 to $10,000 a year, where we’re only paying, like, $1,000 now.”
“We didn’t really get that far with that.”
Paddling Forward
Chan, who is among one of the earliest to come onto the New York City dragon boat scene, was first introduced to the sport in his twenties in the early 1990s when his Chinatown basketball team was invited to participate in the Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival on the Hudson River, near Battery Park City.
“We had, like, two practices and we went — that’s why it was fun. We just watched one video, and we just kind of put it all together within the hour and kind of winged it,” Chan recalled.
“It was pretty treacherous,” Chan continued. The 1,500-pound traditional teakwood boat and the heavy water traffic on the river didn’t help with their amateur efforts. “That first year, I think three boats capsized because of the conditions — so the next year, they changed it over to Flushing.”
Chan has come a long way since those days, and is now preparing for Team USA tryouts in the spring. One thing, he said, has kept him returning to the water season after season.
“We were all kind of insulated in our world in Chinatown back then, but when we were displaying this Asian cultural event and we saw all these people there, no matter what cultural background they’re from — white, Black, Asian, Hispanic — they’re all there, we’re having fun, so it’s this feeling of, ‘Wow, this is kind of a community thing within the big, big city — the Big Apple.’”
Lau, a coach and steerer for the Wall Street Dragons, said dragon boating has connected her to her heritage as a first-generation American born in Washington D.C. to Toisanese parents who owned a laundry.
The 74-year-old said she hadn’t known about dragon boating until the 1990s, when her boss at the Chinatown YMCA at the time solicited her help in recruiting men for a dragon boat team. And until around 1997, most competitive racers had been men.
“And I said, ‘What’s wrong with this boat that it only has men?’” Lau recalled, laughing. “He told me he felt that men would be stronger for the team, and so I said, ‘Well, if this boat can add women, I’ll be more than happy to help you recruit individuals.’”
The former P.S.1 teacher has helped recruit young people onto the scene as well. Some of them, she said, have written about dragon boating in their college application essays and gotten into their dream schools — where they’ve formed their own dragon boat teams.
“It’s been 30-plus years since we’ve been in our own playground at the World’s Fair Marina,” she said. “We’ve paddled through debris, we’ve paddled through sewage. And after a heavy rain, you’re gonna discover dead rats floating around.”
More than just athletes, she said, dragon boaters are also stewards of the pier and of the bay. Each year, boaters volunteer to help clean up the promenade and to touch up the docks. Others have worked with the Guardians and the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge and clean up the bay.
Liao, for his part, said he’s recently put down a deposit for wood he had planned to use to fix up his team’s pier landing — which he ultimately had to put off once he found out the facility will be shuttered.
Wildlife has begun to return to the bay as a result of their upkeep efforts, too. From time to time now, Liao said, a pair of swans would find their way out to the bay from the Flushing Creek.
“We’ll purposely try to avoid them and not disturb them,” he added. “Even the motor boats, when they see the swans, they slow down.”
Other pairs also bond for life on dragon boats — and even have stories to tell of a capsize under the Whitestone Bridge after an ambitious outing there for a marriage proposal.
“We’ve been paddling for so long, the people that met on the boat, they have their kids now,” said Jackson Koo, 43, an emergency preparedness manager for ConEdison and the captain of its corporate dragon boat team.
In fact, he said, boating parents now often take turns babysitting so some can practice while others stay on shore with the kids — behavior typical of what he calls his “summer family.”
“We literally have enough kids of 2- to 7-year-olds, that we joke about how they’re gonna form our future generation of dragon boaters.”
Alan Lee of the United East Athletics Association team, for one, first met his partner, a Team USA member, aboard a dragon boat in 2008 before eventually tying the knot.
“Our son is now seven, and he’s come on the boat a couple of times. My wife showed him some basics and he caught on very quickly — he absolutely loves it,” Lee, 44, said. “We had hoped to get him involved in dragon boats over time, but we don’t know what’s going to happen now.”
Greg Chang, 56, is one of many dragon boaters working to keep the community afloat as the pier’s closure threatens to fragment it.
When he thinks of a typical weekend summer morning at Flushing Bay, he said, he pictures dragon boaters descending from the stairs of the 7-train station at Willets Point and walking through the CitiField parking lot with paddles in hand.
“You have pockets of individuals from several clubs standing next to the boat trying to load up, and you get to say ‘Hi, everyone,” and talk to everyone. I call it very therapeutic,” Chang said. “If we don’t come up with a solution in the marina, the big question that’s being raised is: What happens to the New York City dragon boating?”
“If we leave this marina, what we’re talking about is potentially a decade of absence,” Chang continued, noting his worries that the space would be left to developers who would permanently fend off dragon boater’s return. “We need to be here, and we plan on pursuing all possible avenues to remain here.”
Chang explains the division of labor on a dragon boat: The steerer keeps the boat moving straight ahead and away from obstacles, while the drummer keeps the team in sync and beating with one heart. Three groups of paddlers — the pacers, the engine, and the rocket — compels the boat onwards.
Each, despite some differences, plays a crucial role on the boat’s path forward.
“We’re all trying to band up together, leveraging our various connections and resources to see what we can do to kind of help support this effort,” Koo said. “Because at the end of the day, we are all kind of on the same boat, literally.”
