Queens Local News: Corona Plaza Vendors Cast Adrift After Adams Lost Interest
Two years after a deal with City Hall to remain in business, the 23 remaining vendors work limited hours at the once-thriving Queens market square, hoping the incoming Mamdani administration will help them find a more secure future.
This article originally in The City.
By Haidee Chu
Queens Voice
December 1, 2025
The energetic but unregulated market that drew neighborhood complaints was no more, and in its place came what Mayor Eric Adams called the city’s “first-ever community vending area” — an experimental model for vending outside the existing, backlogged permitting system.
Eighty legacy sellers vied to operate one of just 14 stalls, permitted for five days a week from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Much has changed at Corona Plaza in two years: Just 23 vendors remain within the formalized market, sharing and rotating through the 14 stalls. Most of those who once sold there have dispersed across the city to work elsewhere, unable to make a living under the new setup.
While some locals welcomed the new order, many vendors said their businesses have struggled because they can no longer work during the early-morning and late-night hours — prime time for their blue-collar customers, who used to stop for food on their way to and from work aboard the No. 7 train that rumbles overhead.
“A lot has happened in these last two years. It’s just been very difficult,” said Rosario Troncoso, 52, a food vendor who serves as president of the Street Vendor Association at Corona Plaza.
The plaza’s tenants have had no luck negotiating for more stalls, longer hours and more work days with the Adams administration, Troncoso said. Recent threats of more ICE raids, she added, have also slowed foot traffic and spread fear among vendors, the vast majority of them immigrants from Latin America.
“The change in sales has been very, very drastic — it’s much lower,” Troncoso added.
But vendors and their advocates are hoping their conditions will soon improve with new faces in City Hall and the City Council.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vigorously advocated for vendors, in contrast to Adams, who vetoed a City Council bill to decriminalize some vending violations. (The Council overrode Adams’ veto.) He has also appointed Mohamed Attia, managing director of the nonprofit Street Vendor Project, to the committee on small business on his transition team. Attia has said he will use the role to advance the interests of vendors across the city.
Meanwhile, Councilmember Franicsco Moya — a vocal opponent of Corona’s unlicensed vendors and the market’s expansion — is also on his way out of office because of term limits. He will be succeeded by Shanel Henry-Thomas, who last week told THE CITY she is open to helping the market vendors expand their footprint and operating hours.
“We have elected officials coming into office who’ve been elected by the people not just for their perspectives, but for their policy proposals that respect street vendors,” said Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, deputy director of the Street Vendor Project. “They have the mandate from voters to implement what they ran on.”
She noted that Corona Plaza remains one of few places where vendors excluded from the existing permitting system can find stable work.
“That’s the reason why people keep fighting for it to be successful despite the challenges, despite the weather, despite the limited opportunities that they have — it’s still an opportunity,” Kaufman-Gutierrez said. “The fact the vendors have maintained an association even through the challenges shows an incredible amount of trust and belief that things can be better.”
‘We Used to Be Here’
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Camilo Vivar stopped at Corona Plaza to pick up lunch and to greet his former colleagues. Vivar, a vendor of 25 years, said he used to sell frozen treats in the summer and hot beverages in the winters as part of the plaza’s unregulated market.
“The [formal] market is great, but the hours just didn’t work for me. The hours when I have clients are at night,” Vivar said in Spanish.
The 62-year-old now operates without a license along the perimeters of the plaza in the evenings, opening an hour before market vendors start to clean up at 7 p.m. That maneuver once landed him a $1,000 ticket from the Sanitation Department for vending without a permit.
Vivar is still working to pay off the penalty.
“I would love for there to be more space for me and my friends to work here, more hours, more days,” he added. “I now see people coming off the trains trying to buy things from vendors, but there are no vendors. We used to be here till 11 p.m., midnight, but now there’s nobody left at 8.”
The Adams administration initially said it would consider expanding the market after a four-month trial period, but “there has been no forward movement from the administration” to that end, said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, whose office has provided some funding to cover the market’s operating costs. Richards has also repeatedly called on City Hall to allow for double the number of stalls.
In fact, negotiations mostly halted after former Deputy Mayor of Operations Meera Joshi resigned in protest in February, said Seth Bornstein, who had been heavily involved in talks about the plaza as the former executive director of the Queens Economic Development Corporation, which manages the market.
“There was no one else at City Hall who cared about this as much as she did, and no one I could go to as far as I knew,” Bornstein recalled. “There was no political will under Moya and Adams to make it happen.”
Anna Correa, a spokesperson for the mayor, said the Adams administration “has supported the space” by formalizing the market.
“We remain committed to identifying a long-term partner to sustain the market and will continue to coordinate closely across agencies to ensure the plaza operates safely and cleanly to support the vending community,” Correa said.
QEDC’s current executive director Ben Guttmann said he is optimistic about working with the incoming Mamdani administration.
“There’s really the potential for this to be something we see replicated everywhere,” said Guttmann, who said he hopes that the new administration will help provide added funding, including covering salary costs for its two managers.
The market’s current funding will lapse after this fiscal year, he added, while the temporary permit QEDC holds to operate the market will also expire after December. Guttmann said he is currently working with the Department of Transportation, which oversees the plaza, to extend that permit while he negotiates a long-term agreement with the new administration.
Mamdani’s transition team did not respond to THE CITY’s multiple inquiries about whether it supports an expansion for the Corona Plaza market.
“What I want more than anything is for people to be able to stabilize their businesses with permits and licenses,” said Troncoso.
As negotiations for the plaza vendors have stalled over the past two years, Troncoso said she has also pushed for legislation to expand the number of vendor permits, sometimes skipping work to attend rallies and protest to support former colleagues who continue to work in the regulatory shadows.
The number of merchandise permits has for decades been capped at 853. While a 2021 reform on food permits opened up 445 additional applications annually over a decade, vendors who had not already been on a waitlist by 2017 to obtain one of the 5,100 traditional permits have been unable to apply.
“My biggest wish is to see vendors working with peace of mind, to not have to look over their shoulders all the time for the police,” Troncoso said while helping her daughter tend to her merchandise stall at Corona Plaza on a recent Wednesday.
Nearby, a 53-year-old vendor faced the lunch rush. Her trained hands shaped fistfuls of corn dough into flat rounds for orders of a thick tortilla-based snack, while steam from her grill rose before her face in the autumnal cool.
The vendor, whose name THE CITY is withholding at her request, said she’s worried about federal immigration raids like recent ones at Canal Street and on sidewalks across the city. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had knocked on her door a month ago, she said, and then again two weeks ago. (She turned down her lights and didn’t open her door both times.)
She hopes that the new mayoral administration will find ways to stop mass raids on vendors.
“My children are now very nervous and bothered when I go out to work — they’re like, ‘No, no, no don’t go out to work. Stay home, mom!’ And they call me to ask if I’m OK,” said the vendor, an undocumented immigrant who moved to the city 34 years ago from the Guerrero state of Mexico. “And every morning, when I open the door to go to work, I look out first and check both ways to see if anyone's out there.”
Vivar said he has missed the vibrant community at the old market — and is looking forward to the day when more vendors could return.
“You have more life when you have this conviviality,” Vivar said. “Being a street vendor is what’s given me life.”
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