No bike lane bliss for Blissville

NY Post 

Businesses in one of the last-standing industrial corners of Long Island City say they can only take so much gentrification — and that a planned new bike lane has put them over the edge.

Local industries argue that the cyclist carve-out in the trendy Queens neighborhood will be dangerous for their truck drivers — not to mention the bikers.

“Not every street is safe for a bike lane. You wouldn’t put a bike lane down the middle of the LIE. It’s just not safe. And this is similar,” argued Matthew Dienstag, co-owner of the local LeNoble Lumber.

 But the city — which touts on its transportation Web site that nearly 1 million New Yorkers regularly ride bikes — is plowing ahead with plans to connect the Pulaski and Kosciuszko bridges for bikers.

The connection will come by way of Borden, Starr and Review avenues — a dangerous sector of Blissville infamous for its big-truck congestion.

“It’s like, ‘This is what we’re doing, we don’t give a s–t.’ Excuse my French,” griped Michael Diamond of J&S Supply Corp, a 75-year-old insulation and roofing distributor company, to The Post, referring to the city’s stance.

J&S Supply is one of the dozens of warehouse businesses, as well as a city Sanitation Department waste management facility, that contribute to the heavy stream of truck and forklift traffic traveling in and out of the corridor.

Massive box trucks already swerve across both lanes of traffic to enter and exit their warehouses, a tricky maneuver made even more difficult by the overcrowded streets’ chronic double-parking problem.

Local civic associations and the community board requested the bike lane as a solution to the safety issues.

With space allotted for parking on both sides of the road, just about 22 feet would be left for moving traffic — a significant slice that business owners say they cannot give up.

“There probably will be more truck accidents than there are now,’’ Dienstag argued. “When you have a tractor-trailer pulling into any one of these buildings there to put to back in or to pull out, they’re almost hitting those cars afterwards.”

The business owners said cyclists would be in danger, too.

In a span of one hour Friday morning, The Post observed four cyclists pedal down Review Avenue, including one who opted for the sidewalk path rather than the busy street.

“There’s a lot of trucks, so it’s better this way. No one’s around,” said Richard Derba of Maspeth, Queens, who cycles to Greenpoint along the Review Avenue sidewalk twice a week.

When asked if the incoming bike lane would be beneficial, Derba said it wouldn’t make a difference to him because the vehicular traffic would still be too heavy for his comfort.

The DOT argument to justify inducement of bike lanes would be a little more credible if their data for cycling wasn't two years old. But like the man said, they don't give a shit.

 

Blissfully overbuilding in Blissville

The status as of November 2020: Here it is in 2021: So what the hell is this?

Wait for it....

Stevie needs one more homeless shelter before he exits stage left.

Peruse the filings at your own will.

Sent by the original Crapper

Van Bramer spends a half million dollars on a new flagpole

 

Sunnyside Post

A new flag pole will go up in the Blissville section of Long Island City where a century-old pole was located before it was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

The original flagpole, which was part of the Blissville Veterans Memorial that was established after WWI, was cut down by the city shortly after it was damaged by the hurricane.

Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer said that he had been trying to get the Dept. of Transportation to erect a new pole at the site—which is located where Greenpoint Avenue, Review Avenue, and Van Dam Street all meet—with little success.

Van Bramer said that the agency had failed the community and that he has decided to step in and allocate $500,000 from the city budget to have it replaced.

“The Blissville Civic Association, Community Board 2 and [local resident] Thomas Mituzas have been trying to get the DOT to take responsibility and shamefully they refused at every turn,” Van Bramer said. “Ultimately, I wanted to get this done for the community.”

The $500,000 will be used to replace the flagpole, upgrade the memorial and the public space that surrounds it.

“I want this to be a civic space that the people of Blissvillle can take pride in,” Van Bramer said. “It is of great significance to the residents.”

 

Blissville shelter changes hands; another "hotel" on the horizon

From The Real Deal:

Brooklyn investor Shulem Herman has gone to Queens for his latest purchase.

Herman has purchased a homeless shelter in Long Island City from Lam Group for $36.5 million, according to property records. He took out a roughly $23.2 million mortgage for the purchase from Sterling National Bank.

The 154-room building used to be a Fairfield Inn hotel and is located at 52-34 Van Dam Street.

Who knew owning a homeless shelter could be so lucrative? Actually, that's been apparent for years, so we'll end sarcasm right here.



From The Real Deal:

Another day, another Long Island City hotel from Sam Chang.

The developer filed permits with the city’s Department of Buildings on Monday for a 14-story hotel with 282 rooms. The project at 52-02 Van Dam Street would span about 82,000 square feet and replace a pair of industrial buildings.

This is the latest of many hotels Chang’s McSam Hotel Group is planning for the neighborhood. The company is also building a 324-key hotel nearby at 38-39 9th Street and a 142-key hotel at 38-04 11th Street.

Wow, it's certain that tourists will flock to a hotel that is hard to get to and sits amidst 3 homeless shelters. Unless there is some kind of hidden plan here. Hmm, what could McSam be up to? End sarcasm again.

You know, this neighborhood had so much potential. Instead the city is turning it into a slum. Well, this guy thinks it's great for some reason but everyone else sees the forest through the trees.

Blissville rallies outside Gracie Mansion

From the Times Ledger:

Calling the city’s plan to open a third shelter in a seven-block area of their isolated neighborhood “a threat to the very fabric of our community,” Blissville residents rallied outside the Mayor’s residence at Gracie Mansion Monday morning.

U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Astoria) joined the dozen protesters from the newly formed Blissville Civic Association as they voiced their opposition to the population imbalance that will occur this spring when the city Department of Homeless Services moves 154 adult homeless families into the Fairfield Inn by Marriott on Van Dam Street in the next few weeks, bringing the number of homeless to more than 550 in a neighborhood with less than 475 permanent residents.

“Homelessness is a huge problem in New York and every neighborhood is being asked to do their fair share,” Maloney said. “But Blissville is being asked to do more.”

Maria Davis, the vice president of the Blissville Civic Association, said the population imbalance would be more like a saturation.

“This is not fair share equity, it’s a reckless and dangerous plan,” she said.

Does anyone at DHS have a clue?

From Sunnyside Post:

The City View Inn in Blissville will once again house homeless families with children, the city announced today.

The Department of Homeless Services said the hotel at 33-17 Greenpoint Ave., which is currently housing single adult men, will transition back to temporarily providing shelter for families with children before the school year in September. The specific date and time for the move is yet to be determined.

The DHS says the decision comes with trends the agency sees in the summer months, when more families with children seek shelter due to the school year wrapping up.

The single adult men currently at the shelter, the DHS says, will be transferred to other shelter locations. The agency is expecting several high-quality, permanent shelters to open around the city in the coming months, which will provide capacity to shelter the men at the City View Inn and others.

The City View Inn began sheltering 54 families with children in July 2017, but abruptly switched to housing over 100 single adult men in January. The DHS was met with much criticism at the time due to its handling of the move, where families at the shelter were seemingly notified hours before of the news. The agency has since publicly apologized for the miscommunication.

Behold Banks' B.S.

From AM-NY:

The Department of Homeless Services, which Banks oversees, said the city wasn’t trying to pick on Blissville. In a lengthy statement provided to Newsday, the agency said plans to house about 154 adult families in the Fairfield Inn by Marriott New York/Long Island City at 52-34 Van Dam St. in Blissville was part of the mayor’s “Turning The Tide” proposal. That is an effort to end the city’s 18-year expensive cluster program of using commercial hotel facilities and create transitional housing in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens.

The placement of homeless housing is done after an analysis at the community board level, covering an area of 100,000 people and not just one finite neighborhood that may be difficult to define with precision, the agency said.

CB2 already houses more homeless than it produces. Hell, all of western Queens does as does the entire borough.

Can we cut the crap now?

City doesn't really care what Blissville (or anyone) thinks

Bill's Blissville B.S.

From CBS 2:

Less than 500 people currently live in Blissville, yes, that’s what they really call it, a five-block area in the southeast corner of Long Island City. But they will soon be outnumbered by homeless people.

The Department of Homeless Services is turning the Fairfield Inn on Van Dam Avenue into a permanent homeless shelter for hundreds of adults. More than 100 men already live in a temporary shelter in the City View Hotel two blocks away, and even more homeless families are staying in another hotel less than a mile away.

“People’s cars have been broken into. There have been robberies. People hanging out, asking for money cigarettes and what not, odd behavior,” Perez said.

City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer said he and Blissville residents aren’t opposed to helping the homeless. The issue, he says, is about fairness.

“My district now houses four times the number of homeless individuals than we produce,” Van Bramer said. “And the mayor’s whole plan is about equity.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the homeless population in Blissville will decline as the temporary shelters close, but added, “We’ll keep looking at that community to make sure what’s done is fair.”

Future Blissville shelter "unlike" others - it's sure to be worse

From LIC Post:

A public meeting will take place in the coming days for the community to discuss the new homeless shelter on Van Dam Street that will occupy the current site of the Fairfield Inn by Marriott.

The meeting will be held on March 15 at St. Raphael’s Church, located at 35-20 Greenpoint Ave., from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The event, organized by the Department of Homeless Services, will deal with the permanent homeless shelter for adult families at 52-34 Van Dam St. expected to open this month.

The location will provide shelter for up to 154 homeless families, and is unlike the nearby temporary shelters at the City View Inn and Best Western that have opened up in recent months.

The Van Dam center, according to the DHS, will be a “high-quality transitional housing facility”, and will offer multiple services to help shelter residents, including health and mental health services, employment counseling, and housing placement assistance.

HA HA HA HA!!!

Ask the people of Greenpoint how this "Home/Life Services" treats their neighborhood and monitors the "activities" of the homeless there. Same promises, shitty result:

Officials Blast New Homeless Shelter Being 'Smuggled' Into Greenpoint

Greenpointers: Clay St. homeless shelter attracting unsavory activity

Troubled Shelter Has To Clean Up Act or Lose Contract, City Says

Blissville to get screwed with yet another shelter

Community Conversation Flyer_Van Dam by queenscrapper on Scribd

"Dear Constituents,

Please use this version attached and click to RSVP this event, if you will be attending the Department of Homeless Services discussion on the Shelter at the Fairfield Inn. This discussion will be at St. Raphael's Church at 3520 Greenpoint Avenue in the big room and there will be signage directing you to the location. This is taking place on March 15th at 6:30PM on a first come first serve basis. Any questions please feel free to contact CB 2.

All the best,

Debra Markell Kleinert
District Manager, CB 2Q"

In addition to the City View Hotel converting from homeless families to single men, plus the Best Western hotel across the LIE becoming a shelter, now word comes that the Fairfield Marriott on Van Dam Street is also going to be a shelter for homeless adult couples, and run by the same outfit that is ruining Greenpoint.

This is what happens when you have Jimmy "I lived in a shelter" Van Bramer in charge of your district.

City moves families out of shelter and moves in single men

From Eyewitness News:

At a time of record homelessness in New York City, especially among homeless families, there is a controversy about a shelter in Queens.

A hotel in Long Island City is no longer taking in some homeless families.

Families were given new locations in other boroughs where they had to report Wednesday night. But the transportation promised in that letter never showed up until well after Eyewitness News called the city for answers.

Suddenly a bus which had been parked there before we arrived opened its doors and people finally started loading up. No answers, no apology, no way to live.

You can't trust the government.

The history of often overlooked Blissville

From Brick Underground:

Blissville, a slice of Long Island City bordered by Calvary Cemetery, the Long Island Expressway, and Newtown Creek, is a rough-hewn, mostly forgotten outpost of New York City.

Once a bustling industrial hub, most of Blissville today is occupied by warehouses, auto repair shops, and yes, there are still some factories. There is also a light sprinkling of homes and storefronts, and much of the building stock dates back to the 19th century. Calvary Cemetery looms along the length of Greenpoint Avenue, the main drag of the neighborhood. The walls surrounding the cemetery, and some of the nearby streets, are littered with broken bottles and other trash, giving today's Blissville an unloved look. The gated cemetery is the only swath of green in the neighborhood—there are no parks or playgrounds.

In the neighborhood’s odoriferous glory days in the 19th century, its location on the banks of Newtown Creek is what made Blissville a place to know. By the 1850s, the creek’s banks were lined with glue factories, smelting and fat-rendering plants, refineries, foundries, and other heavy industries, connected to the rest of the country by trains that ran through the area. Now, not coincidentally, the creek is among the most polluted bodies of water in the country.

Another Queens hotel becomes a shelter

From LIC Post:

The Department of Homeless Services has been housing homeless families at the City View Inn in Long Island City since late July, residents learned at a community meeting last night.

The revelation was made during a heated Community Board 2 meeting on Oct. 6 while board members were questioning DHS officials on why the agency started using the Best Western hotel as a shelter without providing the community adequate notice. Some officials said they were given less than 24 hours notice before the decision to use the hotel at 38-05 Hunters Point Ave. as a shelter.

Claims that DHS lacks transparency grew in intensity when attendees were informed that it had been using the Citi View Inn, located at 33-17 Greenpoint Ave., to house 37 homeless families since late July.

A representative from DHS claimed that elected officials and the community board were notified 24 hours prior to the homeless moving into the Citi View Inn. CB2 officials, however, claim that they only learned about it being used as a shelter after the 108 Police Precinct notified them of some domestic disputes at the location — and they did some digging.

Representatives of DHS faced an onslaught of criticism at the meeting, with elected officials, board members and the public arguing that the agency acts in secret to the detriment of the public.

“This is a broken system,” said Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who spoke at the beginning of the board meeting. “It is wrong and absolutely absurd to start moving people in before anyone in the community knows or has an opportunity to talk about it.”

Some board members claimed that Community Board 2 is carrying an unfair burden, with four hotels in the district now being used to shelter the homeless–the Verve Hotel, Best Western, Quality Inn and Citi View. Many also wanted to know how many homeless people came from CB2.

Amanda Nasner, the Queens Director for DHS, said that 416 homeless people are being housed in Community Board 2. She said that 260 individuals who are part of the citywide shelter system come from CB2.

You know what's kind of funny? Amanda Nasner worked for years for Jimmy Van Bramer. Here they are at some kind of soiree together. Kind of amazing that she wouldn't give him the heads up on all this. (Or did she?)

Man almost killed by pothole

From the Daily News:

A man in his 50s was critically injured when he hit a pothole on his scooter in Queens on Sunday, police said.

The man was riding at 37th St. and Review Ave. in Long Island City when his tire hit the hole around 3:45 p.m., police said.

Speaking of scooters and potholes, what ever happened to NYCScout? You know, the little vehicle that used to ride around and report potholes to be filled? According to their website, they aren't going out anymore. Has the program been suspended?

Zero Vision?

Blissville ready for its first park

From the Queens Chronicle:

Residents of Blissville, a section of Long Island City bordered by the Long Island Expressway to the north, Laurel Hill Boulevard to the east and Newtown Creek to the south and west, say they are due for some green space, and are collecting signatures to support their effort.

Miguel Cavanzos, a Blissville resident and the main organizer of the petition, said the children in the neighborhood must resort to playing in the street. He has stressed to members of Community Board 2 that the enclave, home to more families as main parts of Long Island City become more developed and expensive, also lacks any benches for workers to sit on at lunch and that residents must cross busy corridors for any public park.

Blissville, an industrial and commercial area, contains a few hundred residents.

“We don’t have anything, we’re isolated,” Cavanzos told CB 2 in June. “We need a public park. There’s kids that need green space to play.”

Since early June, Cavanzos has spearheaded an effort to drum up support; as of press time, he collected more than 160 petition signatures over the course of a week. Area business owners also expressed support. Cavanzos plans to present them to CB 2 when meetings resume in the fall.

Cavanzos said that as soon as children come home from school, they play in the street or stay inside. He stresses that the area is forgotten amid the development blossoming to the west.

Blissville strip club relocates

I noticed this weekend on my way to LIC that the Sugardaddy's strip club that was formerly on Review Avenue near Greenpoint Avenue has moved to the former Infinity/Goldfingers site on 27th Street near Borden Avenue. I can only hope that this will be a positive change for Blissville. There were no DOB plans filed for the building, but I'll keep my eye on what moves in.

Skeeter spraying at sites across borough tomorrow

For more info, click here.

Google Street View captures magic moment

Here we are in front of 53-24 35th Street, another John Ciafone-owned property. Notice the pile of trash at the bottom right and the appearance of a sanitation violation posted on the door. I don't even want to know what goes on in the basement.

Traffic free-for-all in Sunnyside

Cars and trucks are knowingly riding the wrong way in Blissville...
Here's the news story.

And bicyclists are apparently doing the same in Sunnyside proper. From the Sunnyside Post:

The incident occurred at about 7pm, August 22, and witnesses claim the cyclist was riding the wrong way down 43rd Ave before he hit a moving car broadside.

Be careful out there, folks. Lots of dingbats on wheels.