To mark five decades since the city enacted legislation protecting its most historic places, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz announced events to celebrate “Landmarks Month” across Queens this April.
The borough president’s office launched a special website that includes a Google Map showing the locations of Queens’ 70 individual landmarks and 11 historic districts and a calendar of events in honor of the Landmark Law’s golden jubilee.
The celebratory events include a tour of the landmark Lawrence Cemetery hosted by the Bayside Historical Society on Sunday, April 19, at 11 a.m.; an afternoon tea at the Voekler Orth Museum in Flushing on July 26 at 2 p.m.; and meetings of the Queens Preservation Council on April 27, May 18 and June 29 at Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens.
Katz will also host an anniversary reception for the Landmarks Law at Queens Borough Hall on Tuesday, April 21, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The program includes a glimpse of the Queens Museum’s special exhibit, “Panorama of Queens, 1965-2015: Fifty Years of Landmarking,” in which special markers on the museum’s Panorama of New York City indicate the location of Queens landmarks.
29 comments:
Good now if only the greedy bastards would landmark the LIC clocktower...
That's a very short innocuous list considering the size of our Boro. When was the last time anything worthwhile was landmarked in Queens? The celebration is a waste of tine and money.
Let's start with the Triumph of Civic Virtue and bring it back where it belongs !
What the heck is this nonsense all about?
The Queens Preservation Council goes behind everyone's back to make the 'official' list, then meets with the LPC Chairman in secret once a year.
Then the following year, the Queens Preservation Council goes behind everyone's back to make the 'official' list, then meets with the LPC Chairman in secret once a year.
Then the following year, the Queens Preservation Council goes behind everyone's back to make the 'official' list, then meets with the LPC Chairman in secret once a year.
Then the following year, the Queens Preservation Council goes behind everyone's back to make the 'official' list, then meets with the LPC Chairman in secret once a year.
... SINCE THEY ARE RUN BY THAT BORO HISTORIAN AND QUEENS HISTORICAL SOCIETY PERHAPS THEY CAN MEET IN BROADWAY FLUSHING OR RICHMOND HILL AND EXPLAIN THEIR GOOD WORK AND GOOD PROGRESS AT GETTING QUEENS UP TO THE SAME LEVEL AS THE OTHER BOROUGHS.
Katz celebrating Landmark Preservation is like the KKK celebrating ethnic diversity.
The fatal flaw in the Landmarks Law is no one will help Queens.
Two reasons:
1. Your councilman, lets say Baldy Vallone, is needed in the vote to create a Landmark. Everyone knows that Landmarks are great, but if the Landmark advocates start an effective public education in Baldy's district, he doesn't get their vote. So the borough is prone to misinformation and outright lies by the developers, the press, and the electeds.
2. The people in Queens are lazy sheeple and do nothing besides complain. They make no real effort at improving things. If you try to get them to move forward, and you are not successful within a week or so, their attention span moves on. Throw in a kind word and some pocket change by a politician, and they are happy for a while.
Cut the crap!
In served two terms as a Queens Historical Society board member. In addition I served on the board of trustees of four other Queens preservation groups.
Pardon my French...but WTF have we to celebrate? Compared to other boroughs, we are still bereft of landmark sites and districts. Check the stats for yourselves.
Queens borough hall has had a long history of being anti preservation. The Manes and Shulman administrations set the bench mark for the destruction of deserving landmark sites.
It was Donald Manes who allowed the razing of the Triboro Theatre, an opulent movie palace in Astoria. He and his pal, Tommy Huang, then fixed the Flushing Keith's Theatre good.
Following his corrupt reign, "granny" Shulman...Manes' most apt pupil... finally sank the Keith's. She also did in the Aquacade in FMCP.
Now we have Melinda Katz as the borough's bulldozer ...pretending to care about the preservation of important Queens landmarks. Examine her list of campaign contributors. Developers, developers, developers! Who will she be loyal too in return?
It is lip service as usual that is emanating from borough hall. Lightning up the NYS Pavilion towers is a minuscule gesture.
I gagged at our last BFHA meeting, where Katz boasted about "Lonely Planet's" claim as Queens being a major destination for foreign visitors.
Yeah...right. Anyone interested in buying the Queensboro Bridge?
It will take real action from Katz, instead of words and celebrations...to prove that she's not a liar like her predecessors
That's Stinky Vallone, thank you.
Does Katz and baldy Vallone support the creation of a municipal landmark district for deserving Broadway Flushing?
This neighborhood, which is already a state and nationally recognized district , is overdue for calendaring for a hearing at the LPC.
It's residents are overwhelmingly in favor of creating a historic district here.
Another dog and pony show at borough hall.
If Queens Historical Society had the balls, it would mount a show depicting what Queens' architectural and historic treasures have been lost , and the Queens crap that replaced.
Save your platitudes,beep Katz, and save the Steinway Mansion instead. That is the only way you can boast caring about historic preservation. Action talks and bullshit walks! Prove that you are not the developers' courtesan of choice.
If Melinda Katz is truly a boro president politician of her words and actions, then the wrongly evicted statue, 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue' (which my organization, Civic Virtue Task Force, continues to strenuously fight for this beautiful allegory for all human rights to prevail upon its subjects), would be making arrangements for DCAS Commissioner Stacey Cumberbatch, the Public Design Commission (not to mention inclusionary behavior with Community Board 9 for due process to prevail), to return the displaced statue (which is on temporary loan to Green-Wood Cemetery), right at the exact time that awaits a properly repaired, preserved, conserved and working fountain base---and turn on the waterworks to beautify this now blighted strip mall that I now correctly refer to a hideosity. Last year, Madam President Katz spoke eloquently before Community Board 9's June, 2014 meeting when she said that she intends to empower Queens County into a new era of openness, public input and transparency---yet, despite these words of great eloquence, I'm still waiting for her Cultural Affairs Director, Nayelli Valencia Turrent, and Community Boards Director Barry Grodenchik to meet with us, since our initial (and only) meeting at Borough Hall, on Tuesday, April 8, 2014. In order for true democracy to prevail upon its taxpaying citizens, then our borough president must start the actions that followed her speech before CB 9 last year. A public servant is merely a custodian of trust for its constituency---and not a monarchy of privately approved and engineered plans (by way of previously hatched, secretive directives from Helen Marshall's derelict administration of brainless stonewalling on this issue) for a plaza that rightfully deserves its taxpayer-funded statue back to the proper Queens Boulevard location to which it was dutifully gifted. Yet, red tape, bureaucracy and dismissive, secretive conduct and unwanted plans (that were never publicly, openly approved), is still the credo, edict and mantra of this purportedly new, open and transparent administration that ironically continues to hide and operate in virtual secrecy, where public trust and integrity is still recklessly abandoned, betrayed and damned to Neo-fascist rule. The hardworking citizens of Queens have their eyes and ears towards Borough Hall, Madam President, and we are patiently waiting for honest, ethical leadership (that leads by example) to finally prevail. What say you?
Also, of urgent mention---Since Civic Virtue was capriciously evicted from its watchful post on Queens Boulevard, on Saturday, December 15, 2012, more Queens politicians have been indicted and/or convicted in corruption scandals that actually reinforce the need for this breathtaking statue's immediate return (and its allegorical message of civic virtue itself emerging above corruption and vice), than at any other time throughout the annals of systemic corruption and graft in Queens County, than ever before: Here are their names listed in fallen disgrace: Dan Halloran Shirley Huntley, Malcolm Smith, Ruben Wills and William Scarborough. So, despite the minority objections of a few poorly informed women (or intentionally misinformed), I can't even fathom how a statue whose message represents Civic Virtue for all humankind, could continue to be banished to a Brooklyn Cemetery, among the dead---and not highly vigilant and visible---among the living! Bring back the statue to a working fountain, where water itself is the source of all life. Then, when the waterworks are once again turned on in full purpose and stride, then so too will life slowly return to this vapid, generic, blighted, fenced-in, abandoned plaza of politically motivated desecration and ruin. No one ever approved a 'planted ruin,' or a plaza that recognizes female political leadership in Queens (where, when, how?). The statue should never have been moved (ostensibly for the sake of conservation), in the first place, and now the same force, urgency and purpose must be activated in the reverse for the statue's timely return to a working, beautified fountain base that promotes a prominent display of perpetual, civic vigilance for the entire borough of Queens. Given the recent politically corrupt line up of betrayers of public trust, Civic Virtue's return can't be ordered soon enough---where Queens corruption itself keeps getting worse by the minute!
Richard
Paragraphs, good God man, paragraphs.
(Why does every maverick in Queens have issues). *sigh*
Katz ain't gonna do shit for the borough that has a whiff of controversy.
She is lining up her ducks for a run at the boy mayor in the 2017 dem primary. We all know de Blasio will face electoral challenges being that he is such an empty suit. Katz is just as bad but will do anything to be the first woman mayor of NYC.
Katz even went as far as listening to the dem higher ups and supposedly dumped her live in boy toy Curtis Sliwa, although some in the know say they are still together.
What she is not realizing is that she is as eminently unlikable as the mayor.
Anon 2, not sure if they are 'worthwhile' to you and they may not be the 'last time,' but some recent ones I can think of include the Jamaica Learning Center, originally Jamaica High School, in July 2013; the Forest Hills Firehouse, in May 2014; Hawthorne Court (by the commission; not sure if council acted yet, in December 2014); and the Central Ridgewood Historic District (also the commission in December 2014).
Yes, there should be more.
Making fun of Vallone for being bald is so childish and lame. Grow up.
Richard,
If you want us to read your postings, make them (very) brief. Otherwise, I think they will just be ignored, no matter how much sense they make. PLEASE!
The usual suspects are always in attendance.
If you want to protect Queens landmarks, dump Dr. Jackoff Eichenbaum as the borough historian.
He has voiced the opinion publicly that he is anti landmarking.
Oops...that's why he's been appointed the burro historian. No? Be sure to make no waves, Jack, and you will keep your title.
The
Once again, Queens is fourth rate even when it comes to the quality of its borough historian.. How embarrassing!
Paragraphs or not, the truth is spoken. Good sense versus grammar anytime, me bhouys!
Yeah...DUMP
EICHENBAUM! That boob is a jerk wad who never gets his history straight anyway. He was a NYC apparatchik. His specialty was urban geography, NOT HISTORY!
All he is interested in his himself and his tours...which are boring and unfactual.
If you like Vallone's chrome dome so much, sit on it and get a good massage.
Hey, Vallone's wife likes his head. How about a nice tattoo Don Paulo? Walka proud just like Mussollini. Paulie's got the grimace right at least. Viva Il Duce!
To those who recently complained about the long meditations that I've posted, regarding my organization's rightful demand to return our beloved statue, Triumph Of Civic Virtue, to its home in Queens (and atop a properly working and conserved fountain base): As usual, the messenger is shot---while the message itself is not heeded, let alone actually read. Well, folks, it took many decades for corruption and graft to entrench Queens County. And given that the empowered idiots and unresponsive tyrants continue to ravage and tonsure Queens like the deforestation of the Amazon, I would think that you would all embrace a message of change that actually challenges authority---instead of excoriating the messenger (and message) like a stern, whiny critic! In my defense, at least I'm doing more to banish Neo-fascist and/or communist tactics from this derelict administration than anyone else here online who has yet to put their money where their loud, critical and mouthy traps are! Case in point: Greg Mocker just interviewed me today in front of the statue's former site on Queens Boulevard, and his revisited story already aired at 5:08 p.m. on WPIX-11 news (and with a possible rebroadcast at 10:00 p.m. this evening). So, unless you like your overburdened tax dollars to continue to be spent by a new administration of arrogant, defiant, voracious thieves, that so far has been as transparent as sheet rock, then by all means, please---continue to pick apart my urgent message and focus on the grammatical blemishes of using paragraphs instead. Meanwhile, Melinda Katz has already had her first fitting for the crown that she'll soon be donning for the impoverished, complicit peasants of Queens---whose online complaints continue to divert (off topic), while activists like me are out there in the public's eye doing the actual and real work of challenging corrupt and dishonest authority, that so far you have only managed to marginally challenge from the comfort of your many electronic devices that promote distance, vacancy and invisibility! Well done, guys! In the end, no good deed ever goes unpunished in Queens (as with everywhere else)!
"Making fun of Vallone for being bald is so childish and lame. Grow up."
Yeah, but it's so much fun.
The Civics like Broadway Flushing and Richmond Hill should publicly protest - not a single civic was involved in the planning or involvement.
this is bullshit pure and simple.
If only our city council districts and our community boards were more contiguous! But of course, it's probably intentional that we are gerrymandered in strange ways to remove the power communities might have to actually have the political helft to getlandmarking and historic districting designations they ask for.
Thank you Richard !
Post a Comment