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Bad Girls 2023

Corona businesses and residents venting against illegal vendors

 

 Queens Chronicle

Unlicensed vendors, prostitutes and drunks are creating chaos in and around Corona Plaza, making the area dirty and dangerous for families, according to residents and business owners who rallied for a better environment Aug. 7.

The protesters, who rallied a little more than a block down National Street at American Triangle, held signs in both English and Spanish pleading for an end to fighting and drunkeness in the area, among other issues.

“My office receives from 18 to 20 complaints weekly from concerned residents and business owners who feel the negative impact of the lack of consideration shown by these street vendors,” City Councilman Francisco Moya (D-Corona) said in a press release after the event. “The situation has escalated to the point where it is creating an unsanitary and disorganized environment for everyone in the area.” Moya said.

The event followed an Aug. 2 rally in support of the unlicensed vendors, which was held by activists and area politicians including Borough President Donovan Richards and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx, Queens) after the city launched a sweep that cleared the site of many.

Richards, who credits a task force he formed with improving conditions in the plaza, called the sweep “draconian” and an “injustice.”

He and others who support the vendors, reportedly numbering near 80, say the main problem is that the city does not provide enough licenses. The City Council passed legislation to increase the number of permits available, but the bureaucracy is far behind schedule on actually offering them, according to the outlet Streetsblog — and the number will remain far short of the total believed to be operating in the city.

Merchant Yarin Nadel said he has three businesses in the area but that vendors set up shop right in front of his places and undersell him — because he has to pay to pay taxes, employees and rent — and then leave behind trash that he gets ticketed for.

New Bad Girls

 

 NY Post

A street in Corona, Queens has turned into the city’s boldest open-air market for sex — one so popular with pervs that it’s advertised on YouTube.

As police enforcement wanes and immigration surges, nearly a dozen brothels have set up shop along Roosevelt Avenue near Junction Boulevard.

On a recent weekday in broad daylight, scores of scantily-clad streetwalkers brazenly solicited passersby — including a Post reporter — as sidewalks teemed with kids and legitimate shoppers and merchants.

One sex worker offered a “happy ending” massage for $40 and another offered “full-body massages” for $80.

The women loiter in front of pool halls, dentist shops and massage parlors day and night, and even recruit neighborhood children to hand out their X-rated business cards, concerned moms told The Post.

“How do they have this f–king going on in broad daylight?” one police source asked after seeing photos of the women in the street. “They’re not allowed to arrest prostitutes anymore, supposedly. But they gotta figure something out.”

It’s a perfect storm for prostitution in Corona and other NYC immigrant enclaves, experts say. Vulnerable migrant women unable to legally work are flooding the city, while local district attorneys have chosen to stop prosecuting sex workers.

The Post found the oldest profession has some new tricks:

• The Roosevelt Avenue red-light district is blatantly advertised on a YouTube channel for Spanish speakers, with 10 minutes of footage showing the women working what they call the “Market of Sweethearts,” and two men guiding viewers on how to negotiate with them.

• The brothels appear to be cooperating, rather than competing. As The Post spoke with one sex worker, others nearby filmed and photographed, appearing to warn each other of the journalists’ presence.

• It’s not just happening in the dark of night or inside massage parlors. Women were found plying their trade in the middle of the afternoon, in front of a dental clinic, a pool hall and a barber shop.

• Cops no longer arrest hookers. The NYPD started focusing on johns a few years ago after a prostitute tragically jumped to her death during a police pursuit. In April 2021, then-Manhattan DA Cy Vance announced his office would stop prosecuting sex workers, and other borough prosecutors soon followed suit.

• Brothels and sex workers are actively recruiting kids. Some have them hand out cards with a photo of a sex worker offering “delivery service,” according to terrified moms, about 20 of whom have banded together to form the Community of Young Values and Principles in Corona.

“I’ve lived here my entire life and I’ve never seen it get to this point,” said City Councilman Francisco Moya (D-Corona), who is sounding the alarm about the issue and says he’s asked Mayor Adams to help.

Moya was especially incensed by the “Market of Sweethearts” video by the group Comunidad Latina En Usa, which has more than 19,000 YouTube subscribers.

 

Miracle on Van Doren St.

    

Remember this abandoned house beauty in Corona?

 

 It had a floor collapse and a massive fire.

 

Well get a load of it now.

        

Who says miracles don't happen in Queens?

 

Lithium-ion battery explosion ruins Queens Man's life

AMNY 

Gabriel Dolores, a Mexican native and delivery worker residing in Corona, Queens, recently purchased a second-hand lithium-ion battery through Amazon in order to continue his job with Relay. It didn’t take long before disaster struck, and his life was forever altered.

With the help of a translator, Dolores recounted the fire that broke out at his home on the morning of March 17 when the battery burst as he recharged it, igniting flames in his home that left him homeless with burned, bubbled flesh.

According to FDNY sources, 60 firefighters and EMS personnel rushed to Dolores’ 96th Street residence in Corona, Queens at 6:34 a.m. While the fire was placed under control in under 30 minutes, he was whisked to Harlem Hospital with second degree burns.

“He is very sad because he lost everything. He lost his phone and he lost whatever he had in his room. His clothing, all of the important papers. He lost everything. Basically, right now he doesn’t even have underwear. It’s an unfortunate situation for him but he said he is grateful he is alive,” Jose Rodrigo Nevares Castilla said, a member of Dario De Los Delivery Boys, who helped provide translated details the dire situation.

E-bike fires have been tearing through New York City like a knife through hot butter, leaving destruction, charred apartments, and broken hearts in their wake.

It’s just the latest danger facing delivery workers in the Big Apple, who constantly deal with the threat of attempted bike robberies and traffic collisions in the sun, rain, and sleet. 

Resulting from relatively small Lithium-ion batteries, these power sources have a big impact on the lives of e-bike owners and their neighbors when these devices explode into fireballs. In a conversation with amNewYork Metro, Chief Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn said that the batteries can explode while both on and off charge. He also recommended owners only use batteries that are paired with its designated bike. 

Dolores’ injuries came just days before Mayor Eric Adams signed a new package of legislation into law aiming to combat the sale and distribution of second-hand lithium-ion batteries across the city.

The Corona Extreme Makeover

Remember when I wrote about the Corona Horror house last year? Crappy even posted sarcastically about it on social media.

 

 

 

Well get a load of it now.

Looks like the buyer (or buyers, LLC cough cough) decided to add a patio balcony and put up a fancy new gate too.

The Corona and Rego Park Horrors

 

 

Impunity City

 Located on Van Doren St. abutting 108 St and Corona Ave., this multi-family house has been abandoned for over a decade. And according to Department of Buildings records, it hasn’t been inspected for a decade as well. Apparently there was interior work being done on this home the last time the DOB was here in 2011 and after a bathroom collapsed through the ceiling and the ticket was resolved, the owner and the DOB just gave up on it.

 

 

But it’s not the only shithole in the Middle East of Queens, about 5 miles away in Rego Park stands another abandoned formerly modest two-family house. on Wetherhole St, just a hundred feet from bustling Woodhaven Blvd and a quick walk from the Queens Center Mall.

 

Walk on the wild side in the world's borough

The mirage broker

NY Daily News 

A prominent Queens businessman and political donor is facing accusations that he and his wife lured hundreds of unwitting Chinese nationals into pouring a quarter-billion dollars into two development projects with the promise that their investments would help secure residency in the United States.

According to a complaint filed in Brooklyn Federal Court by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yi “Richard” Xia and his wife Julia Yue persuaded more than 450 investors to shell out $229 million to fund the construction of two five-star hotels, one in Flushing and the other in Corona.

The Flushing development, which was dubbed the Eastern Mirage Project and supposed to be finished in 2013, remains incomplete, and according to the SEC complaint, is “an unfinished and empty glass tower.” The other development, the Eastern Emerald Project, is “a largely vacant dirt hole surrounded by a concrete wall.”

Xia’s solicitations for investments spanned from 2010 to 2017, the SEC contends.

According to its complaint, Xia, 52, and Yue, 41, pitched the hotel projects as a way for investors from China to obtain American residency through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ EB-5 program, which allows foreign nationals to qualify if they invest $500,000 or more in a project that creates or preserves jobs.

But, the SEC claims, the investors who made loans to project developers were being deceived.

Instead of their cash going where it was promised, money investors sent to the Mirage project was redirected to the Emerald development, and money intended for the Emerald project was sent to the Mirage job, the complaint claims.

“Defendants represented to investors that their $500,000 capital contributions would be used only for the construction and operation of that specific project. Instead, defendants repeatedly misappropriated money from one project and used it for another,” the complaint states. “Xia also misappropriated investor funds for personal and other improper expenses.”

To that end, the complaint claims that “at least $9.7 million in ill-gotten gains” were funneled into Yue’s personal bank accounts “for no legitimate business purpose.”

Xia also promised investors the projects would be financed through government bonds and bank loans, according to the complaint, which contends those assertions were false.

Xia and his wife did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

 Campaign finance records indicate that over the years Xia has donated generously to political causes, including contributions to Assemblyman Ron Kim, Councilman Peter Koo, state Sen. John Liu and a Democratic political action committee that wheeled thousands of dollars to former Rep. Joe Crowley.

Welcome to the jungle called Corona

From NBC 4:

Some 10 people were shot late Saturday night near a laundromat in Queens, police say, and authorities are searching for at least two gunmen who escaped on mopeds.

The shots rang out in the North Corona section near 99th Street and 37th Avenue around 11 p.m.

All 10, ranging in age from 19 to 72, are expected to survive their injuries, which police sources described as mostly leg wounds.

Police are now looking into whether one of those victims was the intended target of the shooting, and if the assault was gang-related.

The crime scene was so large that some 7 hours after the shooting, cops were still finding shell casings on the ground.

Corona residents can't find the spare time or a convenient place to get vaccines

 

THE CITY 

The New York City where the streets buzz with people enjoying freedoms newly found after the COVID vaccine is worlds away from the exhausted streets of Corona, Queens, a year after the coronavirus first devastated the neighborhood.

Corona’s streets are crowded, too — but largely with vendors selling what they can to survive, music blaring to compete with the roar of No. 7 trains passing overhead along Roosevelt Avenue.

Fewer people are vaccinated here than almost anywhere else in the city — a pattern driven not by reluctance, say neighborhood health providers, but the inability of many people to break from the grind to get the shots.

Below the 103 Street-Corona Plaza station, dozens of vendors gather daily to sell tacos, grilled meats, elotes, masks, artisanal jewelry, fruits and vegetables along the sidewalk. At the center of the plaza, a COVID testing van promises quick results.

The plaza didn’t always look like this, locals say.

Pre-pandemic, about a dozen or so vendors plied food and wares and around Corona Plaza, said Carina Kaufman-Guttierez, the deputy director of the advocacy group the Street Vendor Project. That number has ballooned to nearly 90 vendors who rotate in and out of the area, many of them newcomers who lost their jobs because of the pandemic and are working without a highly coveted and difficult to obtain permit.

Among them: Liliana Sánchez, who lost her job last spring when the Upper West Side restaurant where she worked closed. The 35-year-old began selling freshly squeezed orange juice starting at dawn in Corona Plaza last May, with her 11- and 13-year old children in tow.

“When this neighborhood had the most infections we didn’t leave the house for almost two months,” Sánchez told THE CITY in Spanish. “But then our savings ran out. It’s difficult to remember that — our savings were finished.”

“We didn’t have food in our house,” she added as tears welled in her eyes, fogging her glasses. “We had to stand on lines for hours and hours at food pantries. We waited on line at a church pantry that was 15 blocks long. Not everyone was going to get food and we would get whatever we could because there wasn’t any other recourse— there is no work.”

“I had to do it for my kids. I would go looking for food but there wasn’t enough.”

de Blasio's mobile Covid testing sites reported missing

 

Queens Eagle

The city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation said it would set up sorely needed mobile COVID testing sites this week in Jackson Heights and Corona. Residents there are still waiting.

Despite four-hour lines at COVID testing sites across Queens, HHC did not set up the testing locations as scheduled. A site that was supposed to administer tests Monday through Friday at Travers Park in Jackson Heights never opened due to inclement and severely cold weather, an HHC spokesperson said. HHC said the location will open Friday. 

To make matters worse, the testing site location is listed incorrectly on the HHC website, which says Travers Park is in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.

The Eagle learned about the missing test site when a reader reached out to say they had tried to visit three times. Another sent a photo of the place where the test site was supposed to be Thursday.

State Sen. Jessica Ramos was on her way to get a COVID test at Elmhurst Hospital when contacted to see if she knew about the missing site. Minutes later, she said she contacted city officials and learned that the Travers Park testing site was closed “due to weather” despite the sunny skies Thursday.

Another mobile testing site in Corona has also yet to open, said Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, who reached out to officials after the Eagle contacted her about the Jackson Heights location. She blasted Mayor Bill de Blasio and city agencies for failing to inform local leaders and communities about the closed test sites.

“The failure to inform the local elected officials and community that these sites would be closed during cold weather is yet one more example of Mayor de Blasio’s complete incompetence,” Cruz said. 

“It is incredibly frustrating to hear him announce seemingly great initiatives meant to save lives, that once again fail to deliver,” she said. “These are matters of life and death for my community.”

The 7-day COVID test positivity rate in Corona’s zip code 11368 reached nearly 6 percent Monday, according to the most recent Health Department data. Jackson Heights’ zip code 11372, where Travers Park is located, reached 2.82 percent. Both neighborhoods were among the hardest hit communities in New York City during the pandemic’s peak.

Auto body shops and used car dealers are annexing sidewalk space

  

Queens Chronicle

Councilman Francisco Moya (D-Corona) helped crack down on “curbstoning” when he was in the Assembly five years ago, with tougher penalties for unlicensed car dealing.

But curbstoning, when a dealer poses as a private seller to sell a car parked on the street, is still common in Corona.

“In some of these streets the residents were saying it was like a used car lot on a public street,” said Capt. Jonathan Cermeli, commanding officer of the 110th Precinct.

Moya wants it seen as a top priority.

“I’m always disappointed when I see that the quality-of-life issues that happen in my community don’t happen in more of the affluent areas,” he said, adding that the precinct has been extremely responsive.

Parking spots are being taken up on residential blocks by auto body shops, mechanic shops and secondhand used car dealers.

“We noticed a spike in vehicles being put in parking spots all over residential neighborhoods in Corona with ‘for sale’ signs on them,” Cermeli said Monday.

The commander said it’s hard to determine if the business owner or employees are usually responsible for curbstoning. He believes a lot of people trying to sell their vehicles now may have been in an accident or don’t have the money to maintain it.

The owner of an auto body shop on 47th Avenue was given a ticket in late October, according to Moya’s office. Reached Wednesday by the Queens Chronicle, someone who picked up the phone after the owner was requested said he had not gotten a ticket and that the boss was not there, before hanging up.

To sell more than five vehicles per year in New York, a dealer’s license is needed.

“Most of these folks don’t have that,” Moya said.

Rents go up at COVID-19's epicenter neighborhoods

THE CITY

In some parts of the city, rents have dropped since the COVID-19 crisis began. But for neighborhoods that felt the effects of the coronavirus most, listed prices have risen slightly, according to a new analysis.

The annual rental report by the apartment-listings site StreetEasy paints a very different price picture between the neighborhoods with the lowest coronavirus infection rates — primarily wealthier neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn — and the hardest-hit areas, mostly in Queens and The Bronx.

Between February and July of this year, rents fell by 1.9% in the zip codes with the lowest COVID-19 rates in the city, like Battery Park City, Greenwich Village and Tribeca, according to the report, comprised of market-rate listing data.

However, in the neighborhoods with the highest rates of COVID-19, per city health department data — East Elmhurst, Corona and Jackson Heights topped the list — advertised rents have climbed a bit in the same time period, rising 0.3%.

 The findings contradict the claim that there’s an “exodus out of the city,” said Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy.

“That’s specific to Manhattan, and a lot of these Manhattan-esque neighborhoods,” she said. Elsewhere in the city, “it’s a very different picture.”

A tale of two Queens towns impacts from the coronavirus

THE CITY 

On paper, Flushing and Corona, two bordering neighborhoods in Queens, are more alike than different.

Separated by two highways and 

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the working-class neighborhoods have a large share of foreign-born residents. Corona is predominantly Latino, while Flushing is home to a large Asian community.

Both are high-density areas with similar socioeconomic profiles. They’re linked by the usually crowded No. 7 train.

Nearly half of workers in both neighborhoods are employed in food service, construction, cleaning and transportation — jobs that New York State has deemed essential through the pandemic.

Residents of both places typically have household income below the Queens median and a similar share of people who lack health insurance, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau. And almost half of apartments and houses in both areas have more than one occupant per room, the Census definition of crowded.

Yet when it comes to COVID-19, the differences between the neighborhoods couldn’t be more stark.

Corona emerged as the early epicenter of the outbreak in New York City and shows no sign of slowing down. Meanwhile, the rate of test-confirmed positive cases of the virus among Flushing residents has remained among the lowest in the five boroughs.

The divergent impact of the virus in two similar neighborhoods suggests that low incomes and poor access to health care alone do not predicate the virus’s damage, public health experts say.

The divide between Corona and Flushing also highlights a striking possibility: that early measures many Flushing residents, workers and businesses took to protect themselves — during crucial weeks while city and state government held back — may have made a difference.

“I was very aware when the virus first started in China,” said a Flushing nurse, originally from China, who spoke with THE CITY on the condition of anonymity.

“I knew we’d be hit hard if America didn’t prepare,” she said.

Anyone see a common thread here?

From the NY Times:

The chockablock density that defines this part of Queens may have also have been its undoing. Doctors and community leaders say poverty, notoriously overcrowded homes and government inaction left residents especially vulnerable to the virus.

From Huffington Post:

You call your district the “epicenter of the epicenter.” What makes your district specifically so vulnerable to all this?

"Well, we have a lot of service workers that live here, undocumented folks that live here, immigrants who are here, and oftentimes, we see that those folks are of lower income, and in order to survive, they have to live in overcrowded, illegally converted homes, which only makes the spread of COVID worse. So there’s really no place for many people who live in my community to self-isolate because sometimes they live 20 to 25 people in a house. We’ve seen this on numerous occasions here in the district." - King Tweeder Council Member Danny Dromm

But remember, folks, if you want to downzone your neighborhood or prevent out of character development, you're racist and should move to the suburbs.

Hate to say that I told you so...*

New York Times

 

Anil Subba, a Nepali Uber driver from Jackson Heights, Queens, died just hours after doctors at Elmhurst Hospital thought he might be strong enough to be removed from a ventilator.

In the nearby Corona neighborhood, Edison Forero, 44, a restaurant worker from Colombia, was still burning with fever when his housemate demanded he leave his rented room, he said.

Not far away in Jackson Heights, Raziah Begum, a widow and nanny from Bangladesh, worries she will be ill soon. Two of her three roommates already have the symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Everyone in the apartment is jobless, and they eat one meal a day, she said.

“We are so hungry, but I am more terrified that I will get sick,” said Ms. Begum, 53, who has diabetes and high blood pressure.

In a city ravaged by the coronavirus, few places have suffered as much as central Queens, where a seven-square-mile patch of densely packed immigrant enclaves recorded more than 7,000 cases in the first weeks of the outbreak.

The chockablock density that defines this part of Queens may have also have been its undoing. Doctors and community leaders say poverty, notoriously overcrowded homes and government inaction left residents especially vulnerable to the virus.

“I don’t think the city communicated the level of danger,” said Claudia Zamora, the interim deputy director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, an advocacy group and worker center in Jackson Heights.

In early March, she said, city health officials sent out fliers with hand-washing tips, but not the outreach workers and multilingual posters that might have conveyed the looming peril.

The sick now include laborers like Ángel, 39, a construction worker from Ecuador who asked that only his first name be used because of his immigration status.

Like many, he said he worked at a Manhattan construction site until he fell ill. He said he was turned away from Elmhurst Hospital because his symptoms were not deemed life-threatening and had been suffering in the apartment in Corona he shares with three other workers. “I don’t have anyone to help me,” he said. 

 City officials rejected the suggestion that they left the city’s immigrant neighborhoods to fend for themselves. The Department of Health, officials said, created coronavirus fact sheets in 15 languages. Officials mounted multilingual public service campaigns in subways and on television, and have provided continuous updates to the ethnic media including on the need for social distancing.

*Title provided by Crappy

Tenant kills his landlord

NY Post

 A deadbeat, rent-owing tenant shoved his Queens landlord down their building’s front stairs so hard on Sunday that the man later died — and the whole thing was caught on the home’s security camera, the victim’s grandson and police sources told the Post.

Landlord Edgar Moncayo, 71, was trying to collect rent around 3 p.m. at his 102nd Street building in Corona when 22-year-old tenant Alex Garces allegedly pushed him down the stairs, cops said.
His grandson, Nicolas Jativa, 20, told the Post that Moncayo was pronounced dead at 12:30 p.m. Monday after being on life support with head trauma at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst.

“My grandmother wasn’t home when this happened, she was on her way back home already when she got a call from a neighbor telling her what had happened,” the grieving grandson said. “As soon as she saw my grandfather she just dropped to her knees and started crying. I didn’t believe it until I saw the video for myself and it’s horrible.”

Police attributed Moncayo’s injuries to a landlord-tenant dispute and were looking for Garces and possibly a second person for questioning, according to officials.

The tenant initially told cops the fall was an accident that happened as he tried to carry his mattress out of the building and hit the front door, causing Moncayo to fall, police sources said.
But the landlord’s family reviewed video from the Ring video camera installed on their door and saw a horrifying series of events unfold.

In the video, the victim can be seen standing in front of the building on the phone with his wife trying to hold the door shut to keep Garces from leaving, the grandson said. The tenant was able to get the door open, however, and allegedly pushed the landlord down the steps, where his head hit the concrete, he said.

I think we know the answer

Great piece over at City Limits.

That which benefits the NYC general fund doesn't necessarily benefit Queens neighborhoods.