The old Flushing Airport lies vacant, returned, 30 years after its closure, to the wetlands that sprawled across this part of Queens a century ago. Waterfowl patrol the site now, and whatever other creatures can handle the pollution from decades of small aviation and maintenance, and decades more of illegal dumping. At the southern end, Mill Creek – which once flowed unimpeded to Flushing Bay through the floodplain separating the villages of Flushing and College Point – emerges from the overgrown vegetation, sludgy and glistening green. In the background, cars hurtle along the Whitestone Expressway.

Opened in 1927 on city-owned land leased to private operators, Flushing Airport was briefly New York City’s busiest airfield, until the much bigger La Guardia, which opened in 1939, superseded it. But ever since its closure by mayor Ed Koch in 1984, it has become largely forgotten, save by aviation and history buffs, and Queens old-timers.

Alan Gross, who grew up in an apartment with a view of the field, said in its heyday the airport hosted dozens of small planes, along with police and television helicopters and, in the mid-1960s, the Goodyear blimp. Second world war-era planes used for sky writing took off from the field. “It was busiest on weekends, with people going out to the Hamptons,” said Gross, who had his first flight at the age of nine with the field’s longtime manager, Anthony “Speed” Hanzlick. “I had an aviation radio and would listen in.”

Today the field has lost its aviation significance and acquired a new one as a contested development site. A 70-acre triangle, it is one of the last large vacant tracts in the city, and the only one near a high-density area. Downtown Flushing, a frenetic retail and banking hub and the largest of New York City’s five Chinatowns, is one mile to the south. In between, atop the wetlands, are light industry, parking lots, city services and the new police academy.

The Goodyear Blimp visiting Flushing Airport in 1976. Photograph: Jay Beck/Alan Gross

To the airport’s west is College Point, a traditional working-class white community that is now increasingly diverse following years of immigration, mainly from Latino and Asian communities. To its north, across 20th Avenue, sits a suburban-style shopping mall built in the 1990s.

To its east, close to the expressway, are a post office sorting facility and the New York Times printing plant. Beyond this stretches a different world, much of it zoned for single-family homes, where leafy streets go for blocks without traffic signals. Like all of the city, these areas are changing too, but sedately.

Large, well-located, and controlled by the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), Flushing Airport has been the periodic object of development proposals, especially during the building boom that accompanied mayor Michael Bloomberg’s three terms (2002-13). None have gone well. Instead, what to do with the airport has become one of New York City’s trickiest planning questions, fraught with neighbourhood politics, demographic change, environmental concerns and bureaucratic opacity.

“In New York City in general, and Flushing specifically, we are running out of undeveloped land,” said John Choe, head of the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce. “When you have a blank slate, it becomes a site of contention over different people’s agendas and needs.”

In 2004, Bloomberg announced a plan to build a 585,000 sq ft distribution centre here for Korean wholesalers getting priced out of midtown Manhattan. Neighbourhood activists mobilised by the area’s Community Board 7 – part of the city’s system of local advisory bodies – shot down the plan. They cited as a critical concern the heavy truck traffic the centre would bring to an area with limited access points, and they held rallies at the expressway exit to make their point. “We backed up traffic all the way to the toll booths on the Bronx side of the Whitestone Bridge,” said Paul Graziano, a historic preservation activist and lifelong northern Flushing resident who was involved in the campaign.

The airport has become one of New York City’s trickiest planning questions

The busy street view of Flushing Chinatown, one mile to the south of the old airport site. Photograph: Bruce Yuanyue Bi/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image

Parochial interests translate to electoral politics. Downtown Flushing and College Point are in different city council districts, and were experiencing different rates of demographic change. The 2004 fight over the warehouse centre turned into a confrontation between two councillors: Tony Avella, whose district included the airport and who firmly opposed the plan, and John Liu, who was instrumental in the plan but whose district lay just across the expressway.

In 2013, Bloomberg suggested making the site a park, as part of a swap that would let the city hand over part of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, three miles away, to build a stadium for the New York City FC soccer team. This plan raised ire as well, this time from advocates for the communities that live near the existing park and use it the most, and who would have little incentive to trek to an inconvenient new location. Like the warehouse plan, this idea seemed peremptory and ill-conceived, and it too got shelved in the face of public criticism.

Locals have had their own ideas for the airport site. Gross, who formed a lifelong fascination with airships from his childhood sightings of the Goodyear blimp at the field, proposed turning it into an airship base – or at the very least some kind of aviation museum. “I wanted to see something on the site that let people know that this used to be a bustling airport,” he said. Graziano, along with James Cervino, a marine biologist and lifelong resident of College Point, proposed a golf driving range, soccer fields and nature trails. The community board has repeatedly asked the city to restrict the site, which remains zoned for industrial use, to parkland or “soft recreation”.

None of this happened. The sole recent activity at the site has been the long-delayed reconstruction of Linden Place, a road along the triangle’s western side, with the aim of unclogging traffic in and out of College Point. The EDC is now supervising the final segment of road work, which involves digging up part of an old runway, and stabilising some 12 acres of wetland as a buffer zone, under rules that require environmental mitigation in exchange for construction activity in wetland areas. Construction hit a snag last month when diggers turned up pools of oil beneath the runway.

The Flushing airport site, from 20th Avenue. Photograph: Siddhartha Mitter

As for the broader airport site, the agency is laconic as to what happens next. An EDC official explained that there are no current plans to develop it beyond its current wetland condition, into parkland or anything else.

But only parts of the site are listed as wetlands on the state register; development could avoid them, or build on some in exchange for mitigation. The official stressed the site’s environmental challenges, including poor soil conditions that require extensive filling and piling for any construction, along with the general lack of access and basic infrastructure, which he said caused the demise of previous plans. Still, the EDC has no plans to seek a zoning change that could limit future uses.

On a recent Saturday, on the other side of Linden Place from the airport, girls’ soccer teams from two Catholic schools played a match on a city field. A mother reminisced about the amusement parks in this area in her childhood, now turned to shopping centres. People strolled in the park by the soccer field, looking out over the much larger expanse of fenced-off airport. Opposite, over a row of shabby houses, rose Point 128, a former factory converted into a hotel and retail complex by Chinese developers.

Jonathan Bowles, head of the Center for an Urban Future thinktank, said opposition to development remains common in Queens. “There is not a lot of appetite to do anything,” he said, citing lack of infrastructure in outer areas as a valid concern. But he noted that the wider Flushing area, now an international business destination, lacked vision from the city as well. “It’s surprising that there isn’t more planning to ensure the area can grow as a commercial centre,” he said. Instead, individual developers are putting up projects, like the massive Flushing Commons residential towers currently rising in downtown Flushing, with no integrated plan for the area. “Things are happening on their own.”

Tony Avella, now the state senator for northeast Queens, remains dubious about the prospects for Flushing Airport. “I would like to see limited development, make it an asset to the community but not add traffic,” he said. “That site is filled with swamp. Buildings would have sunk into the ground anyway.”

Bowles said Flushing Airport might warrant a design competition, with input from residents of all nearby communities. “Let’s get some ideas on the table,” he said. Such a process could identify new, creative uses for the only large vacant site left in northern Queens. Instead, the old airport remains a stagnant, polluted wetland. “Frankly,” Graziano said, “I wouldn’t want to build anything there unless it was amphibious.”

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