Saturday, December 29, 2007

Queens Plaza: What's taking so long?

Elected officials representing western Queens at the federal, state and city level sent a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week in which they said they were frustrated with the slow progress of two projects that would renovate Queens Plaza in Long Island City.

Mayor blasted for lagging renovations

U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Astoria) and several other borough elected officials sent a letter to the mayor in which they said they were concerned with the lack of information about construction start dates for the projects, a delayed groundbreaking for the upgrades, project coordination and that the Long Island City Business District Corporation would bear the cost of maintaining the renovated portions of the plaza.

The letter to the mayor was also signed by Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, state Sen. George Onorato (D-Astoria), state Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan (D-Ridgewood) and City Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Sunnyside).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So that's what it looked like before "steel skeleton hell".

Anonymous said...

Nice clock tower!

Anonymous said...

Look they don't care about the poor losers at Dutch Kills. 'Lets upzone as quickly as possible' they tell them.

The real concern is that the city planning, community board, and politicians lost control over the process, and now they are afraid their upzoning brainstorm will be permanently marred by a dozen Section 8 hotels.

Good. Greed created this mess, perhaps it can stop the overdevelopment of the plaza.

Crappie, if you have a zoning map of the plaza, put it up. A picture will better illustrate my point.

Anonymous said...

The city is more interested in getting us to pay to get on the 59th. Street bridge rather than do anything in the Plaza. The Plaza seems to house all of the Adult buisnesses that escaped to here from Manhattan. The project's on the waterfront to the south represent the wonderfull past city efforts to dump welfare clients onto our Queens shores. Rikers Island inmates are dump here every night. The worst street criminals call this area their playground. Yet this is the gateway to Queens and I find this insulting to all our Queens residents that no attention is paid to radically transform the infrastructure and traffic flow to benefit residents. The new Crap developments will simply add to the woes of this area. No one wishes to tackle this as it seemingly impossible to fix. An Incredible amount of city $$ must be invested to turnaround the many issues here and high time we receive the $$ to do the job.

Anonymous said...

All of these "upgrades"
are to accommodate the influx of hipsters.

The whole area lay fallow for decades.

That was until the greedy real estate interests
started to salivate at the possibility
of making more $$$$$ from what they viewed
as an "underutilized" land tract.

Now the push is on to give the residents
of Dutch Kills the "bum's rush" !

Their civic association's president
is (apparently) nodding his approval,
in true bobble-head fashion,
for the over development that's
slated for this neighborhood!

He's doesn't seem to be putting up much of a fight
to save the area's important historic sites.

What a wimp !