Councilwoman Melinda Katz sang "God Bless America" at Shea Stadium today and it wasn't a good day for either the Mets or Katz.
To Jamie Sutherland, a 130-year-old European weeping beech near the Long Island Rail Road ticket station in Douglaston is more than a tree. It's a neighborhood icon.
The Elmhurst Community Library, a Georgian Revival building on Broadway and 51st Avenue in Queens, lacks the architectural splendor of New York’s more famous libraries. No stone lions guard its steps; no fluted columns bolster its facade.
The Johnson sisters thought they were safe; their father paid off the house before he died in 1995. But hard times began five years later, when their mother, who had only limited health insurance, took out a loan on the house to help pay for her double-bypass surgery. She died the next year, and three years ago, in 2004, Lisa Johnson decided to refinance the mortgage.
The problem is teardowns — the practice of buying a house just to demolish it and put up a larger one in its place. Sounds innocuous enough, but in an older neighborhood, teardowns can be a disaster. This pattern of replacing architecturally distinctive homes with large new structures that loom over their neighbors ultimately destroys the very qualities that make the neighborhood appealing to newcomers and longtime residents alike. 
"So now trees are being cut down, we can hear the trains all the way down by PS107 now, what happens without the noise buffer! Can’t we just be a little more intelligent with the city’s decisions!!!!
"Replacing an 82-year-old home that stood on the site, this McMansion on Annandale Lane in Little Neck is being built on an angle to make it face Little Neck Parkway so passing motorists will be able to feast their eyes on the brown-bricked pile of poop. Taking up every square inch of property and nearly projecting out into the street motorists may wind up driving their cars though its expansive arched entranceway in the mistaken impression that it’s a tunnel. Capitalizing on the opportunity the construction worker out front might collect fares in the wheelbarrow he’s pushing."
The house at the intersection on Jewel Avenue and 112th Street in Forest Hills stands out from its neighbors not only because of its orange facade, but also for its size.
Now if government officials have the hard working, tax paying public at heart (as we are often told), they should stop the inappropriate overbuilding in this city, especially here in Queens. We are sick of developers and their allies being allowed to threaten property owners and to steal homes and our hopes for some contentment in these very troubled times...Remember, (those of you who want to keep expanding the population and the infrastructures here inordinately), when a lifeboat is full, one more can destroy all. Stop trying to sink our little community ships.
Four families were left homeless after a four-alarm blaze tore through two two-family houses on 128th Street in Whitestone last Thursday night, injuring four civilians and 11 firefighters.
Acquiring Udalls Cove "has been a top priority of funding for the Parks Department," Rosa said of the application, which called in part for "an amendment to the city map involving the establishment of a Park addition" and the elimination of 43rd Avenue between 246th and 247th streets. "You have the unqualified support of the borough president on this."
At least a dozen of the neighbors of St. John's University's new Henley Road dorm project addressed Community Board 8 last week during the monthly meeting, upset that the negotiations were conducted without community input and worried about its impact on the neighborhood.
Don't know if you've seen it yet, but there is a new photoblog dedicated to the Queens McMansion:
"Hey you want to hear about some real crap, you should check out the losers at Hunters Point Condos and Hunters View. I was at the sales center this week, and the jerk-offs trying to sell apartments there are two guys - one's an idiot the other is a sleaze... I mean I live in Queens my whole life, and everyone is talking about LIC, and I like it there, but why does it seem that all these projects have people that don't know squat about the neighborhood yet they're trying to tell me? I'm surprised they were even able to find it from Manhattan, I mean they have to cross the river and all...
Here's yet another scoop from the Katz litterbox. Check out the "before" photo of 110-15 63rd Drive. Nice yard. And now, after:
This was sent in by a concerned Forest Hills resident.
Read what happens when Manhattan children of privilege decide to spend the day slumming it in Long Island City and "Masbeth".
Pete's unhappy with Eliot's policy on driver licenses:
Oh no! Major League Baseball might threaten to never grant another interview to the New York Post until they apologize for this headline, which could be interpreted as a death threat!
More photos from 73rd Street and 37th Avenue. Here's a Daily News story on it: Community has a beef with grocer over Jackson Heights traffic 
This truck, containing a full animal carcass, is parked in the spot where there will soon be parking meters. Where's the Department of Health when you need them?
"I'd like to post a letter I've sent to Councilwoman Helen Sears, in response to her stated support for the Community Board 3's proposed addition of parking meters on 73rd Street in front of Subzi Mandi--and in the mouth of the worst (most chronically gridlocked, dangerous) intersection (73rd Street and 37th Avenue) in northern Queens, as anyone who lives near it knows.
Maybe all the Queens Crap drove him insane.
The City Council unanimously passed a rezoning plan yesterday that limits the spread of high-rise buildings along 51 blocks on the Upper West Side, an area that officials say has undergone a significant increase in development. 
I knew there had been a Macy’s in Jamaica before about 1950. And while it is true that the Elmhurst building (afterwards a Stern’s) was especially oriented to car traffic,[1] (being cylindrical with a helical ribbon of parking wrapped five times around) Macy’s Jamaica, an excellent but now forgotten building, had gained public notice almost a generation earlier for providing roof parking accessed by built-in spiraling ramps. Besides, it was an urbane and more than respectable work of art, not merely a clever solution to a problem, nor just a way-station, either, to the suburban tailgate party of the mall in the increasingly city-phobic ‘fifties.
The results are in! WNYC asked listeners to submit their ugly building photos to them for a contest. Queens Crap is woefully underrepresented, although the eyesore parking garage at Queens Plaza with the phragmites growing atop did make the listeners slide show...
Wondering what this is?
About 14 members of the extended family from Haiti lived in the three-story wood-frame E. 19th St. house in converted apartments with a jury-rigged electrical system, a fire source said.
I am going to have a good chuckle throughout the day after reading this:
A water main breaks, a re-routed bus is blamed, but all the paper wants to do is bring up Archie.
What do you do if you live in a piece of Queens Crap, you know, one that has a ramp to the basement garage as a driveway, and it looks like rain?
You sandbag it, of course! This scene was seen on Calamus Avenue in Woodside.
Along the streets of Far Rockaway, many recently built two- and three-family town houses sit waiting for even one family to move in. Some have boarded-up windows, while others have clumps of garbage in driveways that have never seen a car. Desperate developers hoping to cover their bets — and stem their losses — tape up both For Rent and For Sale signs inside windows that face nearly deserted streets.
Have a nicely kept modest home on a large piece of property, but want to cash in on it? 
Sell it to a developer, who will replace your one-family house with 4 shiny new gaudy-looking units! Make sure it's a real shady developer too, one that receives a lot of complaints and fines. Why not stick it to your neighbors? This beaut is at 58-34 74th Street at the edge of Maspeth. The accompanying lot is 58-36 74th Street. One thing positive about it is that there's no 'stairway to heaven' here. But the dressy window pattern is a little over the top.
The brick structure at 110-17 71st Ave. is a skeleton of its former self, having been largely demolished since 2004 in what the city Department of Buildings considers an alteration because most of the facade and some supporting walls were left intact. A stop work order, dated Sept. 12, from the DOB was posted on the construction fence outside, and according to the DOB Web site, which cited work being done at the site was undermining the adjacent property, a lack of approved plans, a defective fence and a lack of shoring at the excavation.
If anyone ever writes a study of New York neighborhood squabbles, it may well include a chapter on the Paving Wars, the decades-old struggle between homeowners who pave over their grassy front yards and those who condemn the practice.
There are no heralded restaurants or strobe-lit nightclubs nearby. The area has no tourist attractions. Finding a yellow cab would be akin to spotting a U.F.O.
Wonderful maintenance on the Forest Hills LIRR Station. Here's a handrail on a handicapped ramp.
And the platform kinda looks dingy too. How about a fresh coat of paint?
