Mayor Mamdani assigns the Department of Health to regulate zombie property lot pollution

Apologies for the f bombs, it's hard to contain my rage for this grotesque negligence. And yes this is the lot where two homeless people got killed and the abandoned house was set on fire 3 times

City approves luxury public housing development on Gowanus Canal while it's still being dredged of toxicities

 

THE CITY 

 With nearly unanimous approval Wednesday from the City Planning Commission, the long-in-the-making rezoning of Gowanus heads to crucial negotiations between key City Council members and Mayor Bill de Blasio over the Brooklyn neighborhood’s future.

The final result will be key to the de Blasio legacy: It’s the administration’s first effort to use rezoning to spur racial and economic diversification of one of the city’s whitest and increasingly wealthy neighborhoods.

The proposal is also the linchpin of efforts to clear up the polluted area, home to the infamous Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site. And the rezoning bid comes as a similar de Blasio-sponsored effort in SoHo and NoHo in Manhattan appears bogged down by intense opposition.

“The status quo is not one that tends toward inclusion or remediation and open space,” said Michelle de la Uz, head of the nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee, which will build 950 units of affordable housing under the Gowanus plan. “People have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that more development can improve the neighborhood.”

Opponents, though, are pressing environmental concerns, from toxicity to the flooding brought by climate change.

“New York City may want to push this through as quickly as possible,” said Linda LaViolette, co-chair of the outreach committee of the opposition group Voice of Gowanus. “However, City Planning has yet to answer many important questions regarding the environmental impact statement.”

The plan to both rezone the area and clean up the pollution from decades of industrial activity has been in the works for years. The current proposal targets an 82-block area, from Atlantic Avenue to 15th Street, bounded by Fourth Avenue on the east and stretching west variously to Bond and Smith streets.

 he rezoning would allow the construction of more than 8,000 new apartments, open space and public amenities like schools. About 3,000 of the apartments would be deemed “affordable,” with many set aside for low-income New Yorkers.

High End Ghetto Manhattan

City approves fancy pool on filthy river

 

NY Post

 This watery venture just scored a formal street address in the middle of the East River.

Futuristic floating swimming-hole project Plus Pool (+ Pool) has officially been given a city-approved location to drop anchor slightly north of the Manhattan Bridge, in the water adjacent to the Lower East Side, Curbed reported.

The project was first conceived in 2010 when four friends at design firm PlayLab floated it by two members of architecture firm Family.

“It started as a simple idea: Instead of trying to clean the entire river, what if you started by just cleaning a small piece of it?” states a project history on Plus Pool’s official website. “With this thought in mind, four designers proposed + POOL — a floating plus-shaped pool in the inner harbor of the NYC waterfront, designed to filter the very river that it floats in through its walls, cleaning more than 600,000 gallons of water every single day.” 

The friends then crowdsourced over $40,000 for their giant East River Brita-filter idea, tested some of its filtration mechanisms at Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2011 and pitched it to city officials.

Garbage barges and abandoned boats in the Rockaways overlooked in city's climate change resiliency plan

 

CBS New York

   Queens residents say they’ve asked the state and city to clean up a graveyard of sunken boats and barges for years.

Now, it’s even preventing a business from opening up.

It’s a disgusting sight that residents in the Arverne section of Far Rockaway are fed up with — rusted barges filled with garbage, slowly sinking year after year.

One is way under with the crane sticking out.

“For 15 years, I’ve seen these cranes in the water, and me and my wife used to joke that they’re probably landmarked,” said Edwin Williams, president of the Heart of Rockaway Civic Association. “There’s a huge East Coast Resiliency Project, but it’s mainly focused on Manhattan. We’re like the forgotten part of New York City.”

Lifelong resident Johann Smiley and his son bought land that sits on the bay on Amstel Boulevard a year ago. They wanted to revitalize the area with a dock and restaurant, but the barges are in the way.

He says it’s been a bunch of finger-pointing and broken promises from different state and city agencies.

“They absolutely don’t care what’s going on here,” Johann Smiley told CBS2’s Lisa Rozner.

He says the barges belong to Anthony Rivara Jr. of Anthony Rivara Contracting, formerly also known as the Pile Foundation, which allegedly owns the neighboring property.

The Smileys say he is a contractor for the Macombs Dam Bridge.

“That garbage that’s on this barge came off of the barges that he took up to the Macombs Dam Bridge,” Smiley said.

Sources confirm they do belong to Anthony Rivara and it’s not the first time he’s had this problem.

Rivara has previously been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by the state for “unseaworthy barges” in other parts of the city.

He did not return CBS2’s calls.

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.

Open streets and restaurants has led to blowback blight

This is going to be a real change for anyone living on Cornelia Street, especially if these dining sheds permanent after the pandemic. There are 10 of them on this one tiny narrow block. Only a few are open right now, but the other ones are getting ready. ⁦⁦@ebottcher⁩ pic.twitter.com/NdIfVplBp8

— CentralVillageBA (@CVBA10014) March 12, 2021

 

Medium

Remake New York is the new buzzword for pundits and politicians. It envisions the post-pandemic city as a blank slate on which to try out cool new ideas. There’s nothing wrong with cool ideas but actual policy requires more than slogans and press releases. It requires planning. It requires expertise. It requires debate and public input.

Permanent outdoor dining is warning for what can go wrong when you remake New York on the fly. Beginning as a temporary measure designed to help restaurants survive the lockdown, the public took to outdoor dining right away. After a grim spring, when moving vans were more common than taxis, people loved the sight of the funky shacks, festooned with fake flowers and painted in gaudy colors, that were bringing life back to the streets.

Elected officials love popular programs, especially if the official has worn out his welcome. Mayor de Blasio jumped all over outdoor dining, declaring that it must “be part of city life for years to come.” Just a few weeks later his wish became an actual law mandating “the establishment of a permanent outdoor dining program” by October 1, 2021. In the blink of an eye, and with no debate, the city tossed out long-established policy, ignored long-established zoning restrictions and gave away public land — sidewalks and roadways—to private businesses.

Local Law 114 is a textbook example of how not to make policy. At a single hastily convened hearing, members of the City Council tossed softballs to representatives of the restaurant industry and Business Improvement Districts. Representatives of the neighborhoods impacted by the new law were nowhere to be found. The official voice of these neighborhoods, Community Boards, didn’t learn what was in the bill until after it had passed.

The one saving grace of this whole misbegotten process was that the city had an entire year before the permanent program took effect. One would think that the Mayor and City Council would have used that time for due diligence on a program they’d cobbled together so quickly. Instead, elected officials took the three-monkeys approach: neither seeing, hearing and certainly not speaking of the problems that came with outdoor dining.

Developers and investor consortium looking to supress environmental review of luxury tower development by Flushing Creek

Curbed

Along the banks of the Flushing Creek—one of New York’s most vital and most polluted waterways—dozens of construction cranes loom over the landscape, and half-finished glass towers cast ominous shadows over the water. During heavy rain storms, the waterway regularly swells, flooding pathways in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the streets of Willets Point, and even portions of the Van Wyck Expressway. And after those storms, the city’s overtaxed sewer system often pours raw sewage into the creek and Flushing Bay, causing a stench to waft from its brackish waters. Dead fish occasionally float upon its surface.

But this chunk of Queens real estate has been targeted for development by a consortium of landowners and stakeholders, including a group called the Flushing Willets Point Corona Local Development Corporation (FWPCLDC) that has long pushed for revamping the waterfront. Last December, the group quietly submitted plans to redevelop a 29-acre stretch of industrial property along the waterfront, which would include rezoning the northernmost section from manufacturing to residential use.

The proposal calls for creating a Special Flushing Waterfront District, which could accommodate a huge mixed-use development with more than 1,700 apartments, retail, a hotel, and publicly accessible open space (including a riverfront promenade that would connect to the recently opened Skyview Flushing Creek Promenade). Developers also want to integrate a publicly accessible road network with the existing street grid, effectively expanding downtown Flushing. The portion of land that would be rezoned could eventually be home to just under 100 below-market-rate apartments.

While proponents say the development will benefit the community, critics are concerned that development will have “immense impacts” on the fragile condition of the Flushing waterfront. 

“Adding significant residential development could overwhelm the Creek’s overburdened infrastructure that already releases over one billion gallons of raw sewage and stormwater runoff into the Creek every year,” the Guardians of Flushing Bay, a group of environmental activists, said in a statement. “Though the plan aims to provide critical access to a virtually inaccessible swath of the waterfront, it is essential that this project, if enacted, be implemented in a way that would enhance coastal resiliency, recreation opportunities, ecological stewardship and equitable access to the waterfront.”

The proposal comes as downtown Flushing experiences a development boom: Between 2009 and 2019, the neighborhood saw the second-largest number of condos constructed in New York City after Williamsburg, Brooklyn, according to Nancy Packes Data Services, a real estate consultancy and database provider. Over the past five years, rents have climbed by a whopping 21 percent. Although historically home to a largely working- and middle-class Chinese immigrant population, many of Flushing’s new developments—such as the massive The Grand at Skyview Parc, which has two-bedrooms selling for around $1.27 million—cater to a new wave of immigrants with deep pockets.

With Flushing booming, the waterfront remains the last frontier for developers. But given the size of the proposal from the FWPCLDC, as well as the fact that the Special Flushing Waterfront District is situated in a coastal flood hazard area, critics have argued that an environmental impact study—which is not required for this particular project—must be conducted before the plan moves forward.

“They’re adding three million square feet along the waterfront,” says Tarry Hum, chair of the Queens College Department of Urban Studies. “Can you imagine the environmental impact?

Update: Community Board 7 approves the rezoning anyway

 At a tense Monday night meeting, Community Board 7 voted 30-8 to approve a development team’s plan to rezone a large section of land by Flushing Creek.

Dozens of protesters showed up to criticize the land-use application filed by FWRA, a consortium of real estate firms behind the project.

The development group wants to rezone a section of the area so it can construct a 13-tower project with 1,725 residential units and 879 hotel rooms–along with retail and office space–by the waterfront.

The 29-acre property is bound to the north by 36th Avenue, to the east by College Point Boulevard and to the south by Roosevelt Avenue.

FWRA seeks the creation of the Special Flushing Waterfront District and a rezoning in order to move ahead with the proposed plan.

The standing-room only meeting was heated. Activists grew frustrated that they were unable to speak until after FWRA presented its lengthy and time-consuming presentation, which continued on until after 9 p.m.

“Let us speak,” some in the crowd pleaded during FWRA’s presentation.

CB 7 Chairman Gene Kelty walked into the crowd and tried to hush some of the unsatisfied people who were waiting for their turn to speak.

In a video of the meeting, one frustrated woman tells Kelty, “Why are you saying this is a public hearing? This is not a public hearing and you know it.”

The footage shows the CB 7 chairman saying, “It is a public hearing,” uttering a few more words that are drowned out by other noise, and then appearing to lunge at the woman to steal her phone before being stopped by police officers and others.

“Let us speak! Let us speak!” the group chanted as Kelty walked away.

Cuomo veto allows pollution to continue in Jamaica Bay

 

QNS:

Disappointed and surprised by Cuomo’s decision to veto the legislation, Dan Mundy Jr., president of the Broad Channel Civic Association and vice president of the Jamaica Bay Eagle Watchers, said they’re hoping to persuade the governor to save the environment. 

“After 30 years of work, Jamaica Bay is the cleanest we’ve ever seen,” Mundy said. “This summer we had a humpback whale inside the bay, right now we have a resident seal population. Our group conducts scuba diving operations out here on a regular basis and we have a 70-foot-deep amazing shipwreck that we’re exploring.” 

Betty Braton, chair of Community Board 10, said the governor’s decision to veto the bill was “very shortsighted” and she hopes he reconsiders. 

“For many of us here, it’s been a lifelong work to make sure that this bay comes back to what it once was. You know, history tells us some bad decisions were made over the years. It had a very serious impact and people were working very hard to turn that around,” Braton said. “I hope that our legislators will continue the work they’ve been doing, which has been outstanding getting this bay back to what it once was: a jewel.”

Help stop idling

From NBC:

Vehicle idling in NYC is not only bad for the environment, it's also not strictly enforced, but now you can help enforce a decades-old law and get paid for it. The I-Team's Andrew Siff reports.

It's the skyscrapers, stupid!

Dirty Buildings Report by Alexander Kaufman on Scribd

From Huffington Post:

The 90-floor tower nicknamed the “Oligarch’s Erection” is the gaudy centerpiece of Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row ― a place where a corrupt Nigerian oil tycoon set a $51 million record for the biggest foreclosure in the city’s history in 2017 and a Silicon Valley tech mogul bought the most expensive home ever sold in New York for $100.5 million in 2018.

But 157 West 57th Street is part of another, equally exclusive club that includes Trump Tower, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, the Kushner family’s 666 Fifth Avenue, the ritzy Baccarat Hotel and Residences and 15 Central Park West, where Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein lives.

That club is the biggest contributors to carbon dioxide pollution in New York, where just 2 percent of buildings produce nearly 50 percent of the city’s climate-altering emissions, according to a report released by New York Communities for Change, the People’s Climate Movement NY, the Working Families Party and two other city-based environmental nonprofits.

Religious ritual is bad for the environment

"Hi Crappy, this is what goes on in Jamaica Bay at Frank Charles park in Howard Beach and the parking area on the south side of the Joseph Addabbo Bridge.This land is under National Park Service control and they claim they can't stop it because it's a freedom of religion issue.They dump into the water all kinds of fruits, vegetables,flowers,and food.On land they also leave behind statues,pictures and reams of cloth flags.

There is supposed to be an ecology minded group within the Hindu community that has been discouraging this practice and they say they do a cleanup once a month but I have never seen them at Charles Park. Last week I saw NPS clean the beach with a four man crew, they say they come every Sunday.

I think if NPS is going to allow this the they should clean the beach more often, nobody being on a beach with rotten fruit and it is bad for the health of the water and the animals that need a healthy environment to live." - Rich

Lots of crap in Bergen Basin!

"Hi,

Just thought that QUEENS CRAP might be an appropriate addressee for this CRAP.
It is over 719 hours since CRAP first started being dumped in Bergen Basin.
That's just about 30 days.
That's alot of crap!" - anonymous

Mandates imposed on building owners to reduce emissions

From Capital New York:

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday that he will impose mandates on the commercial real estate sector to achieve dramatic greenhouse gas emissions among the city's building stock — by far the city's biggest contributor to global warming.

In an announcement tied to Earth Day, the mayor's office said the requirements, along with city programs and incentives, would help kickstart the mayor's goal of cutting building emissions dramatically over the next 35 years.

The mandates are a significant development for the city's real estate world. When de Blasio announced a plan two years ago to cut building emissions, he threatened mandates if private developers did not act quickly enough. After more than a year of meetings with a technical working group, the group submitted a report recommending the mandates.

The city estimates the measures will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by 2.7 million metric tons — the equivalent of taking more than 560,000 cars off the road. The mandates are also expected to save building owners approximately $900 million in energy costs each year and create an estimated 1,300 direct construction-related jobs, the mayor's office said.

We've always known that it's BUILDINGS and not CARS that produce the most pollution, which makes the city's focus on putting bike lanes everywhere to green the planet such a joke. I finally agree with de Blasio about something. Too bad he's probably going to be indicted soon.

Junk in Flushing Bay

From the Queens Chronicle:

Ever since a January windstorm apparently left two abandoned barges adrift on Flushing Bay, environmental advocates and Flushing residents have been asking why nothing has been done to clean up the mess.

Riverkeeper, a nonprofit New York City clean water advocate, has been on top of the incident since the barges first made their presence in Flushing Bay. Their concerns are twofold — not only is it unappealing for residents but it also is harming the environment. Styrofoam has begun to fall off the barges and spreading around the bay. Private property owners alongside the shore have seen debris land.

In January, Riverkeeper contacted the NYPD, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and city Department of Environmental Conservation, informing all of them of the issues. But while there have been responses, nothing has been done.

The condition of the barges has continued to decline over the last couple of months. Steel plating is breaking off and one of the barges broke in half.
Normally, when vessels break in half, both parts sink. But according to James Lipscomb, captain of the Hudson Riverkeeper, these barges have an unusual design called positive flotation. This, he said, makes the barges unsinkable.

Lipscomb and area residents cannot confirm but believe the barges were secured on the east side of Flushing Bay, attached to commercial property, and broke loose during the January storm and drifted to their current location.

Boats sinking in Hawtree Creek

From the Queens Chronicle:

No chance to look off the port bow for two Howard Beach boats, because they’re slowly sinking into Hawtree Creek.

The 50- and 30-foot boats, both belonging to a Bayview Avenue resident, have slowly been listing into the creek after they lost their sea legs about a week ago. Although still tied to the dock, both are just about halfway underwater.

Both were leaking oil and fuel into the creek, which leads into Jamaica Bay, over the weekend until authorities pumped the fluids out of them, according to members of the Howard Beach Motor Boat Club, located a few yards away from the wreckage.

“But that was after a day of leakage that went unmitigated,” said Mike Raffo, a member of the boat club and a lifelong resident of Howard Beach. “Now there’s a whole canal full of gasoline.”

Oil slicks were visible on the water Tuesday afternoon.

Dan Mundy Jr., a member of the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers, said the fluids in the water present an environmental hazard that should be addressed immediately.

“If you have oil in the boat, you have contaminated water and you need to get the Department of Environmental Conservation out there,” he said.

Trying to get a handle on idling

From CBS:

Leaving a car idling is annoying, smells bad, and at the end of the day is hazardous to your health.

The law is already pretty clear.

“You can’t idle for more than three minutes anywhere in the city and if you’re in front of a school you can’t idle for more than one minute,” [Council Member Helen] Rosenthal explained.

She is proposing a new program to train citizens to spot illegal idlers.

“You can see if the car behind me is idling all you would need to do is videotape the license plate, and then load it onto a website at DEP and then DEP would issue a summons,” she said.

The program would require citizens to attend special training. An initial offense would result in a warning, next come a summons and a $350 fine.

The person reporting the violator could earn up to 50 percent of the money once it’s collected by the city.

Big Allis a big polluter

From the Queens Tribune:

The Environment New York Research & Policy Center released a report last week indicating that the TC Ravenswood Power Plant in Long Island City is the State’s most significant carbon polluter.

According to the center, Ravenswood produces about 2.3 million metric tons in emissions, which is the equivalent of about 500,000 cars.

These statistics were collected from U.S. Dept. of Energy 2012 emissions data. Ravenswood generating station is a 2,480 megawatt with the capacity to service 21 percent of the City’s peak energy load.

Rose Marie Poveromo sits on the Community Board 1 environmental committee. In response to the ENYRPC report, she said, “I believe it.”

The plant, known colloquially as Big Allis, has sparked moderate concern from residents throughout the years regarding noise, water and air pollution.

“All [power plants] have to become clean and green,” Poveromo said. “We who live in the communities [are] suffering from air pollution and noise pollution.”

Dorothy Morehead, vice chair of the Newtown Creek Alliance and chair of the environmental committee for Community Board 2, which neighbors the plant, said “emissions from power plants has long been a concern.”

A TransCanada representative disputed the findings of the report.

“Their conclusion is based on estimated data, not actual data. Based on real data supplied to the regulator, our CO2 emitting rates at the Ravenswood Generating Station are significantly lower than what the report claims,” the spokesperson said.

Vibrant and diverse fishing habits

From the NY Times:

It may seem like an unusual spot to catch dinner, across the East River from Manhattan’s imposing skyline. And the tiny fish that a group of fisherwomen trap in these waters may not seem like dinner at all.

But the women, Bangladeshi immigrants who live nearby, show up nearly every day, along a stretch of Vernon Boulevard in Queens that overlooks a sheltered section of the East River known as Hallet’s Cove.

They wear long, colorful dresses and head scarves, and tote numerous metal traps that they toss into the river to lure small, silvery fish typically used by many anglers as bait and commonly called spearing or shiners.

Small fish like these happen to be staples of the Bangladeshi diet, often stir-fried with rice and vegetables. So these women appear this time of year when schools of the fish are plentiful in New York City’s warm waterways, even in this urban stretch of river where the coastline is dominated by power plants and sewage treatment centers.

The women, who lack a New York State-mandated recreational fishing license or a city permit to fish near a boat launch at the location, also seem to be far exceeding the strict limitations that state health authorities recommend for eating fish taken from the East River.

The woman said that when enough fish were in her bucket, she would, as usual, take them home to her family’s apartment in the nearby Astoria Houses public housing project, and serve them to her family for dinner, frying them and adding tomato sauce, garlic, onions, chili pepper and other spices.

Leaf blowers create a cacophony

"This might be a little off topic but the noise pollution from these things is totally out-of-control all over Queens – and now I read that they’re bad for the environment, people and animals. We need to ban them!

Modern Pestilence: Leaf Blowers Generate Infuriating Noise, Toxic Gases and Hazardous Dust

Thanks Crappy!

Regards,

Flooshing Rezident"