From the Queens Chronicle:People from Brookville to Borough Hall are celebrating the city’s approval of $5.3 million for the construction of a nature center at Idlewild Park in Rosedale.
Borough President Helen Marshall, in a statement released by her office on Monday, said the city’s Office of Management and Budget has approved $4.9 million that Marshall had designated from her capital funds, and an additional $400,000 requested by Mayor Bloomberg.
“The Idlewild Nature Center will be an extraordinary educational resource for children and anyone else who wants to learn about the rich variety of plant and animal life that can be found [there],” Marshall said.
Community activists, led by the Eastern Queens Alliance, have been fighting for years to get a center built on the site. The EQA already hosts regular afterschool science and nature workshops in the park for school-age children.
The center will be built near 149th Avenue and Springfield Lane.
It is slated to have two classrooms, exhibition space, offices and handicapped-accessible bathrooms.
Marshall’s statement said construction is scheduled to start next fall, with completion in 2015.
Idlewild Park covers more than 150 acres and was designated as a city park in 1956, but also served as a Department of Sanitation dump for construction debris between 1970 and 1976.
A great deal of toxic material is known to have been buried there.
The city did some remediation in the 1990s, restoring some of the former wetlands and cleaning up some of the contaminants and soil.
5 comments:
Who was the idiot who approved the freight logistics warehouse in the middle of the Idlewild marshes in the late 90s? Somebody ought to slap that pol for creating traffic on Rockaway Boulevard and destroying marshland.
Are you kidding? Queens already has the Alley Pond Park Nature Center ( soon to be expanded) and the Janaica wildlife Preserve Nature Center on Jamaica Bay... a 10 minute drive from Risesale. Who will maintain this proposed one???
Use the $5 million for some else more important that Queens needs. Libraries, after school
programs, park maintenance....
In Flushing we don't even get a place for a Nature call. I've seen a few of its newly arrived residents take a pee between cars on the street.
Welcome to "vibrant, bustling, diverse" flush town!
Lets see now, between this center and Alley Pond thats around $10 milllion dollars in tax money. Nice to see the tax payers have nothing else to do but spend money on unneeded public projects!
Alley Pond is getting that money because the , la-dee-da Douglaston elite want it.
Try getting a nickel for improving Floo-shing!
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