In the wake of the discovery that St. John’s University used semantics to bamboozle its neighbors - promising not to “build” off-campus student residences while contracting with a developer to do it for them - elected officials and residents of a quiet residential street in Jamaica Estates are steamed.St. John’s dorm storm growing
The fact that construction at the site, located at 172-14 Henley Road in Jamaica Estates, has been halted by a “Stop Work Order” issued by the Department of Buildings has done nothing to cool off tempers.
28 comments:
No wonder Catholicism is dwindling in the USA.
THOU SHALT NOT LIE !
And how many more commandments
will be broken in the future ?
is it legal to create a public protest sign with cuss words on it, e.g "SJU is a &%#@ neighbor!" That might be more effective, or at least closer to the truth.
Where is mighty John Young?
Wheel him out for a conference with the community.
Look guys, any developer will say anything they want with full knowledge that the press will not probe, the community board will do their work half-assed, and the preservationists are either clueless, or taking enough money to by their silence.
We need a new CITYWIDE clearing house of grassroots groups to compare notes.
Crappie is the first step.
St. John's is not an Ivy league school, but it offers Ivy league education. The students are very intelligent and respectful. The proposed off-campus residence facility (St. John's residence halls are not called "dorms") will be an asset to the surrounding community. The students that will inhabit the facility will contribute to the diversity of the neighborhood and will proudly embody the values of the University.
WHAT A JOKE! There's the good way, the bad way, the army way, and the St. John's way.
Jamaica Estates has only itself to blame - by refusing Landmarking Status some years ago, this would have been prevented, as would chosing to downzone, which was also turned down.
As for St. Johns students being an asset to the Community, guess again. Anyone who lives in the vicinity of the Campus, or near any of the illegal apartments the students inhabit in Jamaica Estates and other surrounding areas, can attest to the rowdiness, noise, vandalism, and sheer lack of respect on the part of the students. Jamaica Estates is finished as a desirable residential community, and the real estate values will plummet within a very short time.
"The students are very intelligent and respectful," like that one who recently brought a shotgun on to campus.
LOL, so the NIMBY whiners are calling St. Johns a bad neighbor!
Quite ironic when they are the ones trying to stop their "neighbors" from having a place to live. St. Johns was there long before they were in the neighborhood and they were aware of the growing university when they moved in.
The NIMBYs (led by the Gallagher-like Avella, of course) sound like the idiots who move next to an airport and then try and block the noise!
Stupid comment #1:
"St. Johns was there long before they were in the neighborhood and they were aware of the growing university when they moved in."
St. John's was always a commuter school. Mostly cater to local kids living at home and traveling to campus for classes.
Stupid comment #2:
"The NIMBYs sound like the idiots who move next to an airport and then try and block the noise!"
Henley Road is nowhere near SJU.
These SJU pom pom waving cheerleaders are pathetic, standing up for a school that has little interest in them, outside the tution they fork over.
Please don't assume that just because they are students, they will throw loud parties. Jamaica Estates has a full-time private security patrol (Copstat Security Inc) that reports on excessive noise or unlawful behavior.
With proper enforcement, the student residents will know their place, keep down the noise, and study hard.
Jamaica Estates is finished as a desirable residential community, and the real estate values will plummet within a very short time.
----
Ah, oh, another one of Queens preservation leaders. Hey mister, if you did an agressive public education program this community would have been saved.
When I was checking out colleges to attend back in my Senior High School year (decades ago), my English teacher, a graduate of St.John's University, told us NOT to apply to his alma mater IF we wanted to get a good education. He said that everyone who went there called it "The Club". Is this still true? Is a St.John's education of quality caliber today?
Re: Anonymous "Stupid" Comments #1 and #2: you are wrong on both counts.
There have always been St. Johns students in the neighborhood. The difference is that in the past they lived in private housing, and now many live in dorms. If I were a neighbor, I would certainly prefer students in dorms than in apartments, group homes, etc.
You are also wrong about Henley Road. It's absolutely near St. Johns. It's just a few minutes walk from the center of campus, so it's obviously an ideal location for students.
Jamaica estates is a beautiful, historic and tranquil neighborhood. The worst thing about it are the people that live there.
Yeah....dream on "mazeartist".....proper enforcement".
Just like the kind you get from DOB....eh ?
Drunken SJU students puking and pissing
on neighborhood lawns
was the hot topic of "discussion"
of disgusted homeowners in the area
a couple of years back !
Are you going to volunteer to patrol the nabe
after the Friday night chugging bouts ?
will say this much. SJU students do good to read this blog, which imparts much more useful info than those classroom lectures full of factual dribble.
Anonymous says:
"Jamaica Estates is finished as a desirable residential community, and the real estate values will plummet within a very short time."
Yeah, just like property values are plummeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Princeton, New Jersey, or Ann Arbor, Michigan... or Greenwich Village, for that matter.
Colleges bring excitement and vitality into a neighborhood. Improving St. John's - and becoming a more residential university is a necessary condition of that - can only be a good thing for Queens. It's sad (but not surprising) that so many on this blog are too short-sighted to see that.
St. John's survived for years without expanding into the residential community. They have another campus on Staten Island with plenty of room to build on site dorms.
Is it good policy to allow a dorm to sprout amidst one-family homes?
At least Queens College is building their dorm on site and not disturbing their neighbors.
Yes! St. John's should definitely become like Columbia and NYU and take over the entire neighborhood. Just do what's good for them and screw everyone who lives there.
"Colleges bring excitement and vitality into a neighborhood."
Yes! I love having drunk college kids living next door to me. It brings up my property values tremendously.
"Improving St. John's - and becoming a more residential university is a necessary condition of that - can only be a good thing for Queens."
Hopefully, we'll soon have a massive rezoning of Jamaica Estates with use of eminent domain to take private property and hand it over to St. John's. Kind of like what Columbia is doing. This will be fantastic for Queens.
"St. John's is not an Ivy league school, but it offers Ivy league education. The students are very intelligent and respectful."
Lacrosse, anyone?
"As they were when the likes of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York and the legendary basketball coach Lou Carnesecca were undergraduates there, St. John's students today are mostly the sons and daughters of police officers, grocers, court officers, and others whose professions come without executive perks. Eighty percent of them work to help pay fees that are less than half those of Columbia or New York University.
For them, and for alumni, particularly New York politicians, the name St. John's on their resumes is a badge of honor signaling that they are the hard-working children of immigrants, usually the first in the family to go to college.
The president of the student government, Tom Kennedy of Valley Stream, L.I., is the son of an Irish airline mechanic and a South Korean woman who owns a card shop. A pharmacy major who found his vocation when he began work as a drug store delivery boy at age 14, Mr. Kennedy chose St. John's because ''I could live at home, get a Catholic education and work towards a career.''"
This is from a 1990 NY Times article. Has the population served by St. John's changed?
If a dorm is such a good thing for the surrounding residential neighborhood, then why did St. John's feel the need to lie about it?
for several decades there were a couple of bars by the school where the saintly students used to get sloshed out of their minds in pursuit of one night stands. Ah, yes, just the sort of thing to add vitality a community and make property values soar!
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