Spring cleaning at unsightly Steinway Creek

 

LIC Post

 

A number of Queens environmentalists who want to revitalize a filthy inlet in northern Astoria got to work over the weekend with a cleanup around the short waterway–called Luyster Creek.

Located alongside the Steinway & Sons Factory, Luyster Creek – also known as Steinway Creek – branches off from the East River into the top of Astoria. The inlet is estimated to be about 1,000 feet in length and ends at 19th Avenue and 37th Street.

Mitch Waxman – a board member at Newtown Creek Alliance – set up Saturday’s event together with Gil Lopez, from BIG Reuse and Smiling Hogshead Ranch; Katie Ellman, the president of Green Shores NYC; and Evie Hantzopoulos, co-founder of Astoria Urban Ecology Alliance

They were joined by the team from Proud Astorian and other volunteers to pick up discarded items – including engine parts, tires, shipping pallets, bags of household garbage and giant sheets of plastic – around the creek.

In total, the group of about 30 people collected between 10 to 15 cubic yards of trash – filling half of a dumpster.

The crew also removed random items such as fabric roses, potatoes and a taxi cab divider crawling with snails. Volunteers returned the snails to the water, and the divider went into the dumpster, which was provided by the Department of Environmental Protection.

4 drown inside submerged car in Luyster Creek

From the NY Post:

A woman’s 19th birthday ended in tragedy Friday night when the car carrying her and four friends plunged into Steinway Creek in Queens — killing her and three of her pals, police sources said.

The 20-year-old driver escaped the Honda Accord and called 911, but his four passengers — two men aged 20 and 21 plus the birthday girl and another woman — all died after rescue divers pulled them from the submerged car.

“The guy couldn’t stop and the car flipped into the creek,” a law enforcement source said.

The car crashed through a chain-link fence and fell about 15 feet into the water from an industrial area near 19th Avenue and 37th Street in Astoria at about 10:40 p.m. on a foggy night and was completely submerged as cops and firefighters rushed to the scene.

The scuba divers had to break open the windows of the car — which the driver borrowed from his grandmother — to rescue the people inside, the source said.

The driver and passengers were at Buffalo Wild Wings in Queens celebrating a birthday party before they went into the water, not far from a city wastewater treatment plant and the Rikers Island bridge, police sources said.

Neighbors noted the street doesn’t have a “Dead End” sign that would have warned the driver.

Ok there's some things here that don't make sense. Buffalo Wild Wings is in Forest Hills on Continental Avenue near Austin Street. How and why did the car end up on 19th Ave in Astoria?

Also, why did all the media outlets refer to this location as "Steinway Creek"? It's name is Luyster Creek.

And then it gets even worse...

From the Daily News:

An SUV overturned into the East River early Saturday morning in Astoria just blocks from where four friends lost their lives when their car plunged into the Steinway Creek hours before, authorities said.

The SUV was apparently driving north on 20 Ave around 4 a.m. when it ran through a brick wall and a chain link fence and overturned into a waist deep inlet of the East River where the street abruptly stops at Shore Blvd., witnesses and authorities said.

Neighbor Yvett Kasanakis, 48, a bridge painter, helped the four passengers out of the murky waist-deep water. All four suffered minor injuries, one was treated at Mt. Sinai and one was brought to New York Queens Hospital, fire sources said.

FDNY divers did not find any other passengers in vehicle.

The shivering twenty-somethings told Kasanakis they were leaving a nearby club and heading to Neptune Diner when the crash occurred. They also told the Good Samaritan that the driver, who they claimed to have just met, had fled after the accident.