The ‘Before’ Picture of the HQ2 Sites

Instead of one new home, Amazon chose two. Two places, with waterfront views and organic shops and abandoned buildings, that will someday house tens of thousands of high-tech workers.

Photographers with The New York Times spent much of this week in those two places, Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, and Long Island City in Queens, New York, to capture life there as Amazon named them the winners of a 14-month-long beauty contest for its new headquarters.

Together, the two areas — both are neighborhoods, not actually cities — could help make Amazon one of the largest private tech employers on the East Coast. Once Amazon fully moves in, neither will likely be the same.

Long Island City is home to the country’s largest public housing project. But for many walking along the park in the area that hugs the East River, what stands out are the shiny new high-rises, baby stores, coffee shops and yoga studios.

Since 2010, more apartment buildings have been built in Long Island City than in any other neighborhood in New York. Apartments in dozens of the new buildings sell for an average of more than $1 million.

Many residents fear that Amazon’s arrival will only intensify the gentrification making the neighborhood less affordable for people of limited means. Over the next decade, Amazon said, it plans to hire as many as 25,000 people, who will earn, on average, $150,000 a year. That same number of people, earning the same amount of money, are expected to fill Amazon’s offices in Crystal City by 2030.

Crystal City, just across the Potomac River from Washington, was the vision of a developer, Robert Smith, who in the 1960s began to construct commercial buildings and high-rise condominiums on lots once occupied by industrial buildings and junkyards. The neighborhood was named for a crystal chandelier that Smith hung in the first building.

Over the last dozen years, many of the neighborhood’s prominent tenants left, sending Crystal City into a prolonged decline and leaving it without a strong residential or commercial identity. But a recent boom in the Washington region has helped fuel some redevelopment in and around Crystal City, which Amazon, like the local officials who pitched the area to the company, has started referring to as National Landing.

In the end, Amazon said, it chose these two places, out of more than 200 that had thrown their hats in the ring, because of the talent it could recruit. And with an army of well-paid workers will come amenities.

A short walk from Amazon’s future site in Crystal City is a new Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, and a restaurant that features a drag night. In Long Island City, bars line a strip that’s home to a Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant and a trendy chicken and waffle spot owned by the rapper Nas.

The hope over time, for the officials who made the pitch, is that Amazon will help cement their neighborhoods as destinations, with easy access to transportation, ample housing and enough interesting things to do that they’ll no longer be overshadowed by Washington and Manhattan just across the water.