■REAL ESTATE By Angela Matua City may put LIC’s Socrates Sculpture Park on the map Socrates Sculpture Park, a 30-year-old outdoor museum and park in Long Island City, may soon be considered official parkland and added to city maps. The park is owned by the city but maintained and operated by Socrates Sculpture Park through a licensing agreement. The city wants to officially map the parkland to secure it as open space and make sure that the land will not be developed, according to Socrates Director John Hatfield. “This action will make the park a mapped park, thereby securing it for the future,” Hatfield said. Hatfield and a representative from the Parks Department presented their plan in front of Community Board 1 on Tuesday. Along with the official mapping, the plan would also allow the Parks Department to acquire Rendering courtesy of Mount Sinai Queens/NK Architects/Davis Brody Bond, LLP, Associated Architects The new 140,000-square-foot extension for Mount Sinai Queens will be completed this fall SUPER SIZED a piece of land used by the park through an exchange with neighboring Costco. The piece of land has “looked and acted” like the park for 30 years, but is actually owned by Costco, located right next door. In the exchange, Costco would receive the development rights for another parcel of land. Hatfield said this agreement is “the result of over a decade of conversations with the Parks Department and the property owner.” If Socrates Sculpture Park acquires the land, they will look to add trailers for office space and an area for children’s programming. CB 1 approved the proposal on Tuesday, which must also be approved by Borough President Melinda Katz and the City Planning Commission. The outdoor museum and park, a former abandoned landfill and illegal dumping ground in Long Island City, was established by Mark di Suvero in 1986 as a place where artists can present their sculptures and multimedia installations. More than 150,000 people visited the park in 2015, which is opened 365 days of the year and is free to attend. Astoria’s Mount Sinai Queens expansion to be completed this fall Community hospital Mount Sinai Queens has been steadily working on a new 140,000-squarefoot expansion and is hoping to complete construction this fall, the hospital’s executive director announced at Tuesday’s Community Board 1 meeting. According to Caryn Schwab, the $150 million, six-story project will add a state-of-the art Emergency Department, six new operating rooms and expanded outpatient medical services. The building will be located right next to the original Mount Sinai Queens, at 25-10 30th Ave., and has taken 15 years to plan, she noted. The 30,000-square-foot Emergency Department will have a combination of private rooms and emergency rooms, and physicians will be able to run a plethora of diagnostics tests including CAT scans and PET scans. This addition will quadruple the size of the most heavily used department in the entire hospital, according to the hospital’s website. A new ambulatory driveway will provide easy access to the department and Schwab said they are hoping to open this department in February. The second floor, which is scheduled to open in March, will house the out-patient imaging center, and patients will receive tests ranging from basic X-rays to MRIs and mammographies here. The six new operating rooms ― each will measure 600 square feet ― will be constructed on the third floor and are “capable of doing just about any type of procedure,” according to Schwab. The new rooms will be connected to the operating rooms in the existing hospital to allow physicians easy access to both areas. They are scheduled to open in April. Though the operating rooms will allow doctors to perform a number of procedures, patients in need of cardiac surgery will be transferred to Mount Sinai Manhattan. A new Interventional Radiology Suite will also be housed on the third floor. Physicians specializing in primary care, pediatrics, endocrinology, obstetrics and gynecology and more will have offices on the fourth and fifth floors. These offices, along with a waiting room, are expected to open in May. The new entrance on Crescent Street should be completed in the fall, and the entire facility is expected to be running by September. The existing emergency department, a 4,000-square-foot space, sees about 50,000 patients a year, which is “almost unheard of” for such a small area, according to Schwab. She added that the new facility will give patients not only a state-ofthe art emergency department, but also a place to receive standard check-ups. “We’re anticipating that in addition to operating the emergency department, our job is to make sure that people get the right care in the right setting,” Schwab said. “So we want to make sure that if you don’t need to be in the emergency room, you also have a physician available to see you.”
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