Check out this compilation of Super 8 footage and shots of Flushing and environs dating from about 1978 to 1990. You can see the RKO Keith’s, and the U-Haul Building back when it was the Serval Zipper Factory, and lots of tracking shots of the 7 train coming into Queens from Manhattan.
Via QueensCrap:
The uploader, “trainluvr,” has many other videos of trains, planes, and the urban landscape set to totally sweet music.
The New York Times conducted an investigation into the hiring practices of the Empire State Development Corporation, but the accusations of favoritism these days is a little bit different from the political corruption you read about in the histories of Old New York:
New York State’s economic development agency created a new position last June, and then found a candidate to fill it: a young man named Willard Younger, who had just graduated from Colgate University with a degree in classics and religion. He became a special projects associate, at a salary of $45,000 a year, according to state personnel records.
His father, Stephen P. Younger, is a lawyer and power broker in legal circles who was a member of one of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s transition teams. He has also donated $26,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaigns over the years, disclosure records show.
The Times goes on to give a few other examples of the Cuomo administration’s hiring practices. Instead of providing donors or associates with an influential or lucrative political position, the office gives out entry-level jobs for their recently graduated sons.
Empire State maintains that the jobs have been advertised extensively on job banks and state government websites. They say that the Times’ line of questioning is nothing but an attempt to “create a scandal.” But it’s not that governmental hiring through connections is such a surprise, or that Mr. Younger is an under-qualified employee. It’s the purported function of the office that makes the whole thing look bad:
At a time when New York’s unemployment rate is higher than the national average, Empire State is supposed to play an important role in helping the administration bolster the state’s economy. It offers loans, tax credits and grants aimed at attracting and keeping businesses.
With about 300 employees, Empire State is one of the smaller state agencies. But governors of both parties have often used it for patronage because legally, it is a public authority — nominally independent of the state government, though controlled by the governor.
As with the seemingly countless other community economic development corporations, agencies, and nonprofits meant to serve a depressed and disadvantaged population, sometimes you get the feeling that the best thing they could do to affect economic opportunity is to just give up their job to someone else.
5Pointz, the outdoor art exhibit space in Long Island City, is probably better known for Flushing residents as that big graffiti covered building that you see when the 7 train first breaks above ground coming from the city. After almost twenty years of being canvas for aerosol artists from around the world, the building is set to be demolished and rebuilt as a set of residential towers. However, the developers behind the project say that the new building will try to draw from the tradition of the public art site. The space will contain designated artist galleries and studios on the ground floor, and “art walls” to keep up the informal democratic flavor of the original. It’s an attempt to make an intelligible connection to a celebrated symbol in a neighborhood that’s had a lot of trouble branding itself.
LIC has been touted as the next great neighborhood of New York, on the heels of Williamsburg and Bushwick. To its credit, the commute into Manhattan is pretty amazing. But trying to get people excited about another go-around of converted industrial space has been kind of a struggle, especially as developers have acted quicker this time. The buzz for LIC was short-lived, even for something as inherently fleeting as the golden age of an urban bohemia. People barely even had time to be nostalgic about it all.
Outsiders still think of LIC as the cool, different neighborhood of Queens. It’s the most relatable place for someone from Manhattan or the more publicized parts of Brooklyn. Maybe this is the way all neighborhoods on the rise in New York City will be from now on: functional and convenient and expensive and with no more pretense of bohemianism or transgression or any kind of magical realism about it. As you ride along the 7 line from LIC deeper into Queens, you can kind of imagine the attitude in the near future, different from the present and the past, but then again not really. It’s not the East Village in the seventies. It’s not even Williamsburg in the aughts. But it’ll do.
Prior to 1990, the New York City Board of Estimate was the governmental body responsible for budgeting and land-use decisions. This eight-member Board consisted of the Mayor, the Comptroller, and the President of the City Council, each of whom had two votes, and the five Borough Presidents, each of whom had one. In 1989, however, this setup was declared unconstitutional, as it gave a massive borough like Queens the same effective representation as the much less populous Staten Island. Under the new City Charter in 1990, most of the responsibilities of the Board were delegated to the City Council.
Ever since, the post of Borough President and its intended function have been rather vague. And yet, candidates are working hard to replace the four outgoing term-limited Borough Presidents this year. So far they’ve raised more than $5.3 million from donors and qualify for almost $1 million in public matching funds for a position that doesn’t have a very well-defined purpose.
Certainly you can still do a lot with the position, even if there’s not much in the official job description. The New York World looked into the creative ways in which the current Borough Presidents have wielded their power, from Marty Markowitz’s real estate development deals to Scott Stringer’s advanced wonkery. The Helen Marshall section was the least flattering part:
Why show up at all? Just take a vacation!
During her 12 years in office, Queens Borough President Marshall proved skeptics wrong by successfully promoting Queens as a destination of choice for vacationers.
She put her weight behind the creation of the first Queens license plate, planted a subway car next to her office and turned it into a tourist center and trumpeted at every occasion the borough’s slogan, “Visit Queens… See the World.”
But some would say that Marshall took her encouragements to holiday in Queens a bit too personally.
First, last year, the New York Post quoted exasperated sources in the president’s entourage venting their frustration at the president for being “AWOL” throughout much of the summer.
More recently, the Daily News got hold of her schedules and calculated that Marshall had taken a total of 41 business days off of work in 2012 alone — the equivalent of eight full weeks.
Conveniently, the City Charter doesn’t specify how many days of vacation borough presidents are allowed to take.
The 83-year-old Marshall fought back. She said she had been taking care of her husband, who had back surgery.
The perception of the Borough President’s uselessness is prevalent enough that Claire Shulman, the former Queens BP, wrote an Op-Ed to try to justify her position. Besides citing the discretionary fund that the BP can dole out, and how if the position didn’t exist, “Manhattan would walk away with all the resources that currently cover major projects in Queens,” Shulman concludes by bringing the whole issue back in a circle: “Don’t fool yourself – if you are elected by a country of two million people, that’s power and everyone listens!”
There’s been a proper clamor about the inequality among New York City parks, especially in light of splashy donations like John Paulson’s $100 million gift to Central Park last year. Although Flushing Meadows Corona Park is one of the largest and most frequented parks in the city, it has a lot of trouble operating on the meager public funds set aside for Parks Department. In 2010, New York City dedicated only $239 million of the $63.6 billion total budget to parks, or about 0.37%. In contrast, Chicago spent almost $150 million more on their park system, which is some 21,000 acres smaller.
Now, Julissa Ferreras has announced her support for a public-private alliance to help fund the upkeep of Flushing Meadows Corona Park:
City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras (D-East Elmhurst) said such an alliance could solicit donations from Queens residents and businesses for the borough’s 1,255-acre, flagship park.
It could also eventually seek a cut of the rent paid to the city by Citi Field and the U.S. Tennis Association, which are located in the park, she said.
“Flushing Meadows-Corona Park has not received the attention and resources it deserves,” Ferreras told the Daily News on Wednesday. “We get such a small percentage of the dollars that are generated by our park reinvested into our park.”
Holly Leicht, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, said she supports the idea of an alliance.
“It is the most heavily used park in Queens,” she said of Flushing Meadows, which is bordered by low-income, immigrant communities. “It really does need that public-private partnership to have that level of care it deserves.”
This comes after months of political back-and-forth between elected officials, the City, developers, and select Parks advocate groups over the three simultaneous proposals for a USTA expansion, a large shopping mall next to Citi Field, and a new MLS stadium.
But despite all the righteous noise, it seems pretty clear that almost everyone quoted in the news stories were seeing eye-to-eye from the beginning. Even those who positioned themselves as protecting public park land agree that Flushing Meadows Corona Park needs help from the private sector. The USTA and MLS must make “concessions,” they say, and do their part to maintain the park they occupy. But no one even raises any other option of helping to fund and maintain the park. The idea that the City itself can provide sufficient financing for its parks system is completely out of the question.
Back in February, Ferreras and fellow elected officials Joseph Crowley and Francisco Moya sent a letter to the USTA urging them to hire union construction workers, contribute to the upkeep of the park, and offer discounts for local residents to the tennis centers’ facilities. They went on to say that these changes would “go a long way in mitigating our concerns.”
Will Sweeney, a member of the Fairness Coalition for Queens, a group that ostensibly formed to protect the park, proclaimed the concessions to be a step in the right direction.
As for the soccer stadium, Ferreras also stated that her approval would be contingent on a commitment from MLS to provide long term funding for the park. Holly Leicht, the director of New York for Parks quoted above (and seemingly everywhere when it comes to parks issues in the City), had been consulting with Ferreras and strongly backed the idea of a conservancy-type arrangement for FMCP.
Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for MLS, answered back: “We look forward to continuing our ongoing conversations with Councilwoman Ferreras to figure out the appropriate way for MLS to contribute to the future of Flushing Meadows Corona Park.”
A spokesman for the Related-Sterling joint venture behind the shopping mall next to Citi Field also weighted in: “The Queens Development Group’s project will benefit the entire neighborhood by cleaning up 23 acres of contaminated land and bringing much-needed jobs and economic development to the area, while at the same time creating new open space without impacting a single inch of existing parkland. As good corporate neighbors, we are committed to working with the Councilmember and local leaders on issues that are important to the community including, of course, the preservation and enhancement of open space.”
So everyone involved conveniently agrees? Elected officials and park advocate groups and developers and sports associations are all on the same page? They did a good job making it seem like a controversial issue at first.
In any case, MLS announced this week that it’s hoping to reveal formal plans for the stadium project in 4 to 6 weeks. “If we get this done, it will be in Flushing Meadows Park,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said. “There is no Plan B.”
