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TIMESLEDGER |16 QNS.COM | JAN. 31-FEB. 6, 2020
BY JENNA BAGCAL
Longtime Douglaston resident
and Bayside Times resident cartoonist
Arthur “Tip” Sempliner
died on the evening of Jan. 21. He
was 76 years old.
According to his wife Diana
Saunders, doctors at St. Francis
Hospital in Long Island diagnosed
Sempliner with a “massive
gastrointestinal infection” last
Friday. Saunders said neither she
nor the doctors could pinpoint
the cause of the infection.
After Sempliner was admitted
to the hospital, doctors put
him on total life support but he
succumbed to his condition early
Tuesday evening despite the hospital’s
best efforts. Saunders said
that she has “nothing but praise”
for the doctors and nurses who
took care of Sempliner during his
time there.
“The nurses were checking
on him every three minutes and
the doctors would come in at least
four times a day,” Saunders said.
Sempliner was born and raised
in Detroit, Mich., and came to
New York in 1969 as a professor’s
assistant at the Pratt Institute
in Brooklyn. In the early 1990s,
Sempliner began teaching production
methods and industrial
design classes.
He studied art at the University
of Michigan and pursued
a master’s degree in business
before becoming an industrial
engineer. During his lifetime he
served as both a designer and
the vice president at Dorwin
Teague Associates (now known
as Teague), the president of Construcciónes
Sempliner in Spain
and the founder of Chelsea Design
in New York.
An accomplished inventor,
Sempliner held dozens of patents
for things like a cable grommet
system used in data centers and
improvements on a bobsled used
by Olympic athletes.
Saunders does not remember
exactly when Sempliner began
drawing cartoons for the Bayside
Times but believes it was sometime
“in the 1990s” when he got
to know the newspaper’s former
owners.
His cartoons were often commentaries
or critiques on current
events, politics and pop culture.
Saunders recalled that her husband
won an award for the best
editorial cartoon in the 1996 New
York Press Association’s Better
Newspaper Contest.
“He was a good guy with a
great sense of humor. He was interesting
to be with and was very
knowledgable,” Saunders said.
He is survived by Saunders,
his wife of 24 years, daughters
Courtney and Winthur, stepdaughters
Fiona and Fenella and
five grandchildren. He will be
buried in Detroit in his family’s
plot. Specific funeral arrangements
have not yet been set.
Reach reporter Jenna Bagcal
by e-mail at jbagcal@qns.com or
by phone at (718) 260-2583.
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Arthur ‘Tip’ Sempliner, a longtime
Bayside Times cartoonist, dies at 76
The Halletts Point megaproject on Astoria’s waterfront
will remain in limbo after talks broke
down between the de Blasio administration
and the Durst Organization.
The $1.5 billion project was going to build more
than 2,000 units in a seven-building complex with a
waterfront esplanade, public spaces, retail, sewers and
streets, but the two parties could not come to an agreement
over $21.6 million in city funding that was promised
to the developer in 2015.
“We will not cut special deals that result in more
profit for developers and less affordable housing for New
Yorkers,” City Hall spokeswoman Jane Meyer said.
So, for the foreseeable future, the only building that
has been completed on the site is 10 Halletts Point with
its 405 units, 81 of them affordable.
“For a project as large and complex as Halletts Point
there needs to be a partnership between the city and the
developer and for whatever reason we haven’t been able
to forge that partnership and without that the project is
simply not viable,” Durst Organization spokesman Jordan
Barowitz said. “Therefore we are suspending the
project until the next administration in the hope they
will share the enthusiasm that the local community
and we have for the development.”
That is bad news for the Astoria Houses NYCHA
complex right next door on Halletts Peninsula where
47 percent of the residents are unemployed or underemployed.
The project was expected to revitalize and reconnect
the community to the rest of the neighborhood
while providing thousands of job opportunities in construction,
retail and security. Astoria Houses residents
were to have rental preference over 50 percent of the 400
affordable units.
Claudia Coger, the president of the Astoria Houses
Tenants Association, is demanding answers from the
Durst Organization and the de Blasio administration.
“We are setting up a meeting with the Durst people so
they can tell us what their intentions are,” Coger said.
Coger, who has lived in the Astoria Houses since she
moved to New York City in the 1950s, has been bitterly
disappointed by the de Blasio administration in recent
years. Last June, the de Blasio administration backed
off an ill-conceived plan to close the senior center at the
Astoria Houses and bus residents to the Queensbridge
Houses despite the facts that a $500,000 renovation had
recently been completed at the facility.
“Look, I’m old enough to know politics set out like it
out to be and sometimes things fall apart,” Coger said.
“They owe us an explanation and that’s what we’re going
for right now.”
The residents of Astoria Houses deserve answers to
why they have been treated as an afterthought during
this impasse.
A portrait of Tip Sempliner. Courtesy of Diana Saunders
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