11101

If you want the full spectrum of contrasts, head for Long Island City. Here you have a borough with an industrial history and the buildings to prove it. This is the westernmost neighborhood in Queens, flanking the East River, so the area affords some of the best views of the Manhattan skyline along with the 59th Street Bridge, which connects it with Manhattan. There are historic districts with beautiful row houses/brownstones. The Citicorp Building stands at 658 feet - the tallest building in Queens and outside Manhattan. On the waterfront a former dock facility was converted to Gantry Crane State Park. Large scale residential conversions and developments have been undergone, such as building which formerly housed the Eagle Electric Manufacturing Company and in areas of LIC such as Hunter's Point.
Long Island City was formerly its own city, created in 1870, and became part of the City of Greater New York in 1898. The area has gentrified - many of the factories have been converted to other uses - the former Silvercup Bakery, whose iconic sign can be seen from many vantage points, is now Silvercup Studios. This studio has been used to film many well known music videos, commercials, films and television series such as the Sopranos, Sex and the City, Gangs of New York, 30 Rock.
Artists have been resettling to LIC for many years. Art organizations as well as independent artists are located in the neighborhood. P.S. 1 Contemporary Art and Sculpture Center are located here. Isamu Noguchi converted a photo-engraving factory into a workshop, now a museum dedicated to his work. 5 Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin', is an artists residence in a converted warehouse. Graffiti is allowed there - the structure is a living collage of graffiti.
The largest fortune cookie factory in the United States, Wonton Foods, is in LIC. Donald Lau writes the fortunes. For a fascinating anecdote about this company and good fortune, see Fun with Numbers below.

Fun with numbers: I found the zipcode for Long Island City, 11101, very interesting for a number of reasons. The number is a string of ones and zeros only, making it binary. In decimal, this is 29, which when totaling the digits becomes 11. Stripping out the zero in the zipcode, we have 1111. Numerologists believe that events linked to the time 11:11 appear more often than chance or coincidence. In May 2005, Wonton Foods printed a series of lucky numbers. Five our of six of these coincided with the winning numbers in a Powerball drawing. Because of the large numbers of cookies printed, 110 people (binary again) won approximately 100,000 each. And my own zipcode? - 10011. :)

According to an article in the the New Yorker: "Lottery officials suspected a scam until they traced the sequence to a fortune printed with the digits “22-28-32-33-39-40” and Donald Lau’s prediction: 'All the preparation you’ve done will finally be paying off.' "