Repairs to a damaged fountain in Kew Gardens began this week and will include plans to transform the site into a plaza dedicated to women of the borough, according to the Queens borough president.
The $720,000 restoration project by the city's Department of Design and Construction will repair the stonework at the base of a fountain at the corner of Queens Boulevard and Union Turnpike on the ground of Borough Hall. The project will also improve landscaping, install benches and a plaque to honor the borough's women.
Restoration of Civic Virtue statue: $50,000 vs. Creating new plaza: $720,000
Translation: Someone's relative needed a contract.
41 comments:
Let’s see: Illegal conversions, illegal truck driving on residential streets, horrible roads and sidewalks, illegal garbage dumping, smashed & unlicensed cars parked on streets, polluting waste stations in residential areas, illegal curb cuts are just some of the issue that asshole Queens President Borough Katz and obese Leroy Comrie should concern themselves with, not this bullshit over what they call a “sexist Civic Virtue” statue and instead are spending over $700,000 dollars for a project to honor the women of Queens, you mean honoring asshole females like Melinda Katz and her predecessors like ding-bat Helen Marshall and Claire “Bulldog" Schulman, those fine and upstanding public servants.
Another asshole female politician, Karen Koslowitz said “This new public space will now be able to be enjoyed by everyone, and will contribute to the quality of life enjoyed by the residents of our borough.” REALLY this is going to contribute to the quality of life when none of you fucks even address quality of life issues that have plagued this borough.
The Civic Virtue statue of a naked man standing atop two female sirens was considered sexist. It was controversial from the beginning, as many questioned the use of a male figure to represent virtue and female figures to represent vice and corruption. Lucky that is not Comrie on top.
But hey with females like Katz, Marshall, Schulman, Vivian Cook and Shirley Huntley, they do represent VICE AND CORRUPTION, so what is the issue.
Preet Baharra's investigations should be sharp focused directly on Queens borough hall, the wellspring of corruption!
The Donald Manes days are sprouting again! The never went away. Calling the FBI. Investigate local. It's right under your nose.
Queens FBI headquarters are located right across the street in what has been called the Darth Vadar building.
Plaques for Claire, Helen, and a few other brainless non- leaders will surely be included in the plaza. There will also be a reserved blank space for you know who.
I am sure there are two more (competitive) bids that are even higher$$$
For $720,000 they could have replaced the Civic Virtue statue with one of Queen Catherine of Braganza whom the County of Queens is named after.
I yield the floor to Richard Iritano on this one.
This tribute will be covered with as much pigeon shit as civic virtue, and with the perpetual neglect that was shown before.
Queens is not named after Queen Catherine. It is named after the title of Queen.
How about using the money to pave some streets in Queens.
Queens is not named after Queen Catherine. It is named after the title of Queen.
Since Catherine was the Queen at the time that Queens was named, it is often said by historians that Catherine was specifically being honored.
Let me get this straight. This entity will be dedicated to ALL the women of Queens or to just a select chosen few? The reporting is not clear on this.
Happy Mothers Day.
$700,000 for some flowers and plaque, millions for dog runs...glad to see the money of the city's tax payers is being so "wisely" reinvested in the communities.
How about demolishing this fountain and just spending a few thousand on new benches and sidewalk repair. Save the rest for more important projects. - Alfster
When Curtis Sliwa is Borough President, he will get the Civic Virtue statue back to its base on Queens Boulevard. Just wait.
What?????
Holy Christ, there were entire posts dedicated to disproving that Queens was not named after Queen Catherine. Let's review one:
When will we finally bury Queen Catherine?
And I know of no "historians" that bought into this bunk that were not appointed by a borough president to further an agenda. See below:
"In the naming of Queens in the Charter of Liberties in 1683, the assembly had made no mention of Queen Catherine of Braganza." - Jim Driscoll
“Why is this Portuguese Princess worthy of this honor? Because by accident she was married to the English monarch at the moment when the royal province of New York was divided into administrative units called counties? Because she is a woman?” - Jeffrey Kroessler
Cheap industrial fence looks like shit, worse than nothing at all.
Its that nasty fence temporary or are they filming a "Escape From NY II" movie ?
Queens borough hall had to go arms lenght since the slavery issue was raised on the Queens Catherine issue, but the NY Historical Society has a time line with this still in it and here the fiction, like a toxic dump refuses to go away.
People tried calling them and they were stonewalled. Perhaps Crappy can have some fun contacting them showing the buffoons behind this fiction for what they are.
In Queens, when these dipshit postal clerks get something in their little noggins they just dont want to part with it. If they can be forced to change even a little bit of bullshit like this, a president is set and they are afraid of that.
As far as what's happening with the Triumph of Civic Virtue statue is concerned, you could never invent a story like this because it just would not be believable. City first denied any secret plan to move the colossal statue off of Queens Blvd. City then implemented its secret plan, and moved statue to a Brooklyn cemetery on the pretext that cemetery would bear certain costs of restoring the statue. Instead, public funds paid to restore the statue – on the premises of the cemetery, where the statue remains now. Meanwhile, City is implementing separate plan to renovate the statue's fountain base at Queens Blvd., at a cost 10x greater than the cost of restoring the statue, and WITHOUT ever returning the statue to its base once everything is restored. Would you restore the frame of the Mona Lisa, then put just the frame on display while sending the actual painting somewhere else, and expect the public to believe that's terrific? That's what is happening. The only beneficiary here is Brooklyn's private Green-Wood cemetery, which received a valuable colossal public art statue – still public property – for the cemetery to display as it pleases. That's why this issue is not over, yet. And it's a perfect example of why Queens is the laughingstock of art, among all of the City's boroughs.
The area needs better lighting and the streets not to be paved. Is that not a priority??
The quality of life improvements to Queens County would be to remove two metastasized cancers like Melinda Katz and her pudgy pal, 'Krooked Karen Koslovitz' where lunch and a manicure is a stressful day.
What I don't understand, Karen, is that for less than $50,000, 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue' could have been cleaned, preserved and conserved right on site (and, not evicted under the cover of darkness on Saturday, December 15, 2012---a symbolically forceful, unwanted action that announced to all of Queens County, and in particular, Kew Gardens residents, that corruption and vice are alive and well, despite your voracious attempts to remove the daily reminder frm the skyline---and, to pass the $200,000 damages for its eviction onto the taxpayer, without due process and public referendum, no less!
But, if there is any justice left in this earthly coil, then I pray with a superhuman effort, that you will both succumb to the same, infected greed, graft, profligate, wanton waste and depraved, reckless sociopathy that compelled you to betray all pretense of public trust and integrity, with impunity (to flag and country) in the first place.
Because, you can reject the symbolism for why Queens County needs a vigilant, daily, hourly reminder of all vice and corruption by an allegorical monument of breathtaking beauty like 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue' (of whom you so openly practice, without consequence), but as long as you are in derelict residence, the scent (and permanent stench!) of all of that putrid corruption will always memorialize you, from cradle-to-grave---as well as all of the other monstrously failed, female, pathological, entrenched, establishment-rigged, party machine-ordered raw sewage that Kew Gardens Plaza will now reinforce, instead of a towering statue of Civic Virtue, emerging triumphantly over the very corruption and vice that you continue to practice, invite and FOIST on your outraged-and-livid subjects---and, you can do it easier than you collectively breathe!
Better to install a planted, backed up commode at Kew Gardens Plaza, as a porcelain gesture of massive, symbolic fail that represents the endless flow of raw sewage that has already destroyed Queens County---to diabolically ruinous effect---with a daily, fresh supply of raw sewage that is worse than nuclear proliferation!
PREEEEEEEET, hurry please---Melinda and Karen's 'shared' bidet is overflowing ---and, the stench is even more unbearable than their raw, political sewage!
While we are talking about wasted tax dollars at Queens Borough Hall, how's that glass atrium coming along. The one where 50 cherry trees had to be chopped down. If at recall correctly, the space us supposed to be for civic events. Any update? Anyone?
And who, pray tell, will decide which women will be honored ?
Just like how ISIS destroys all vestiges of the past in Palmyra, Queens elected officials wish to destroy the borough's past.
For those of you just seated in the theater, you can see the entire surreptitious removal in December 2012 of the work of Queens art known as "Civic Virtue" HERE. and its bucolic existence exactly a year later in Brooklyn's Green-Wood cemetery HERE.
Again, Queens has always been squalid and crooked since Mayor Gleason - this was a dig by LaGuadia to Queens politics which is why they disrespected it from the moment is was installed - at the ceremony almost no one showed up as it was all but ignored save the lunch hour crowd in borough hall.
They wanted it out, got it out, and damn the expense. Just show up at a dog run, a taste of Queens event, or one of their participatory budget shams and they are heroes.
"...for a project to honor the women of Queens,...
You know this deserving woman won't be an honoree.
Today, when I called Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley's office, one of her transplanted lackeys from Boston named Kate told me that I shouldn't be listening to anything posted on Queens Crap, because, according to her, "The content is false, low grade and unreliable."
What to make of Kate's peculiar comment, given that Queens Crap is the ONLY public forum blog that doesn't airbrush the massive, never ending corruption, greed and graft that continues to obliterate this already ravaged and tonsured borough of near, complete anarchy, and if this is the way that Crowley's office believes that this is how free speech and democracy should work---by not encouraging a public blog site to be viewed with credibility (when it tells the truth that no one in city and state government is telling), then the problem is not with Queens Crap and its vocal audience---the problem is within the office of Councilman Crowley and her 'Friends & Family' payroll!
Kickbacks plain and simple.
How about Angelina Crane? (via gothamist comments)
http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/3605/5660/original.jpg
I would like to see a statue of Ozone Park's Cyndi Lauper in her She's so unusual cover pose.
Or a big pair of tits. This was asked twice already, but what women is the Queens Steamer referring to? She never clarifies, like every other elected she just relies on mantric repetition in her responses. The more the lie is said, the more they hope people and themselves will believe.
Truthiness is what it's called.
Richard, just out of curiosity, where DID Kate suggest you get your information, considering that QC often posts Council press releases directly?
Richard, just out of curiosity, where DID Kate suggest you get your information, considering that QC often posts Council press releases directly?
Why ask - its the lackey press or the events at the Queens Library, both vetted and controlled the developers and their political stooges.
Queens named after the title Queen or Queen Catherine??
Who cares?
If that's the biggest issue you have on an average day you are doing pretty good.
Who cares?
If that's the biggest issue you have on an average day you are doing pretty good.
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Its symbolic of lies, pandering, and authority. Its a good a start as anywhere.
I contacted the New York City DOI last November 6, 2015, and I filed an official complaint, regarding the many, egregious that Melinda Katz (and, by larger extension, the City of New York), had willfully ignored the entire Civic Virtue debacle, namely that the plaque that is positioned in front of the statue that was evicted to Green-Wood Cemetery STILL contains 'KNOWINGLY FALSE' information regarding why the statue was moved there without public authorization, due process and all pretense of public referendum, in the first place (the plaque still oddly states that the city could not afford to maintain Civic Virtue's upkeep and repairs, which is a statement that is an outright lie). The investigator with whom I spoke on November 6th was Rickey Young, and despite how he told me that there would be regular updates from the DOI about my complaint, I never heard back from them since my initial call to him last year.
Worse, as of yesterday, May 5th, I spoke to one of the DOI's many incompetent cronies named Andrew Brundsman, who informed me that I should consider myself "lucky" to have even reached him, because, according to him, most people never get the opportunity to speak with him because of his position level at the DOI. What???? Is he exalted??? He then told me that a letter had been sent to me to explain why the DOI would not be pursuing this matter, which I haven't received yet, but it doesn't matter what they say in writing---the way they already, completely ignored my complaint, ever since I filed with the DOI last year, tells me everything that I need to know about this 'openly practiced' derelict agency of epic fail, and how they now devalue all honesty itself---and, without consequence.
From the very beginning, the capricious, sloppy and egregious actions that were taken against a priceless and relevant sculpture like 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue' (where any other civilized country in Europe, and throughout the world, would covet such a gift, instead of giving three consecutive, mad, uneducated, empowered idiot-females licence to willfully neglect its maintenance and upkeep, over the course of more than 35 years!), involve publicly funded, taxpayer money that has never been properly vetted, much less authorized.
And, if THIS long term, publicly exposed debacle (and dereliction of public duty), doesn't shine a glaring spotlight onto why Queens County is now a radioactive cesspool of political waste (and grinding graft, greed and corruption that never ends), then I don't know what it will take.
Keep the pressure on, fellow Queens Crappers---even the Newtown Creek Waste Treatment Plant located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn), doesn't have this much incoming raw sewage in a year's tiome---that all of Queens County is dumped on in a single day!
I thought they were going for a "planned ruin" look.
That image just looks like they planted some flowers and pocketed all the money.
We will be there - vociferous - when they have the ribbon-cutting.
Why honor just women ? Isn't that being prejudiced? What about transgenders? Or handicapped people?
you know maybe we can see improvements and much needed renovation and restoration of our infrastructure and ample amount of affordable housing for the majority of poor people if we just bequeathed them with tributes to women
"Why honor just women ? Isn't that being prejudiced? What about transgenders? Or handicapped people?"
You're onto something, my friend. The Civic Virtue statue was allegedly sexist. This new women's monument is not? Anyone want to explore the legalities here?
Actually, the REAL criminal, city government, rigged-party-machine sociopaths were two former Queens Borough Presidents, Claire Schulman and Helen Marshall---Schulman, for perpetrating a dereliction of public duty (as she willfully ignored the lawfully required maintenance and upkeep that allowed a magnificent statue like 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue' to be blighted, and nearly decay into a pillar of salt in the first place), followed by the lethally ignorant Marshall, another handpicked, party machine crony who flagrantly abused her power with impunity, to the point where she FOISTED her own insidious, self-appointed monarchy rule (and wildly unsupported opinions about public art that were never in her purview to adjudicate!), onto a stymied public, when she was able to unilaterally order a 16-ton statue to disappear from the Kew Gardens skyline (without a full board vote from Community Board 9, much less public referendum, hearings and City Charter, bylaw observance), with the same apathy and indifference of a child's discarded toy soldier---and, NOT A WORD FROM ANY OF THE QUEENS, POLITICALLY FAILED SYCOPHANTS, like Elizabeth Crowley, Peter Vallone, Jr., and Jimmy Van Bramer (who ironically continues to chair the Queens Arts Committee)!.
Meanwhile, the capital cities of any number of European countries would KILL to receive a precious, irreplaceable gift like Civic Virtue to adorn their VALUED public squares and WORKING fountains! But, what did this deranged, ignorant, uneducated, West Indian woman negotiate for the statue (instead of a simple, on site cleaning that I suggested in 2008, that would have cost less than $50,000)? She orders it banished to a Brooklyn graveyard, where the allegorical female sea sirens of corruption and vice can do no justice---an audacious move that was not publicly supported, and evicted to graveyard obscurity---out of sight, and out of mind!
This is what government tyranny looks like, fellow Queens residents, and now I just feel extreme anger and pity for the current BP (the third female president in a row without any graduate, MFA art credentials), for whom a dereliction of public duty is an understatement (as all three give mendacity a bad name!)---but, not SO SORRY that there shouldn't be a thorough investigation into Katz's willful, profligate, wanton waste and intensely incompetent mismanagement, where she has just imposed another $720,000 onto the bilked, duped, scammed and damned taxpayer, with a monstrously self serving project to destroy the fountain base of Civic Virtue's prominent display pedestal---all in the name of vainglorious greed, arrogance and Neo-Fascist, monarchy rule that now DEVALUES all honesty itself! (To be continued.)
Part Two:
Worse, the corrupt-and-empowered idiots at the NYC Department of Investigations didn't even bother to investigate my thoroughly documented complaints against Czarina Katz (since November 6 2015---before any work orders were approved for Kew Gardens Plaza, in which I attempted to alert the DOI into action, given that Scott Stringer was about to approve a work proposal in December for the plaza site), and her empire of lies, disloyalty and all 'openly practiced' corruption, greed and graft---where, amazingly there isn't even any attempt to cover-up their egregious transgressions, when the system itself continues to secure their totally abused positions of power, without consequence---for which every Queens resident pays a price for their grinding, systemic corruption that never ends!
Now, I am making every superhuman effort to 'DISRUPT' this FOISTED project of OUTRAGE that nobody in Queens County ever wanted (much less was ASKED if we wanted!)---except all of the most entrenched politicians like the profoundly disgraced Helen Marshall (as well as the equally disgraced Schulman, Katz and 'Krooked Karen Koslowitz), all of whom would be a part of the memorialized women of Queens that Kew Gardens Plaza would be falsely honoring in the absence of any and all public approval, and Community Board 9 meetings and hearings (and chosen to be memorialized by the the SAME, corrupt women who are currently serving public office, in disgraced!)---as the monumental, POLITICALLY EVICTED, 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue' statue that represents an ACTUAL triumph over all corruption and vice, IRONICALLY continues to keep vigil over a lifeless Brooklyn graveyard---forgotten in virtual obscurity---and, murdered by the exact political vice and corruption for which the statue represents! And, the public be damned!
Alas, I am relieved to know that the proud and educated sculptor, Frederick MacMonnies is deceased---because had he been alive to witness a political desecration of one of his most important and salient works of 20th century art, it would have killed him instantly---exactly like all Queens Civic Virtue itself has been murdered---to massacring effect!
And, if THIS latest debacle of taxpayer waste and mismanagement doesn't call your attention and action to demand an impeachment proceeding for this arrogant and corrupt administration that has so completely betrayed all pretense of public trust and integrity, then I don't know what will!
Let the ribbon cutting protests begin, en mass---this is not democracy---it's anarchy!
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