Community News
22 AUGUST 2017 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
Town Hall
BY ANGELA MATUA | AMATUA@QNS.COM
As part of his week in
Queens, Mayor Bill
de Blasio held a town
hall in Astoria where he held a Q&A
session and announced several improve-ment
projects for the neighborhood.
The mayor answered questions on a
variety of topics during the three-hour
session on June 19 at P.S. 70. He also
revealed that the city will take on several
initiatives to improve streets and public
spaces like libraries.
Steinway Street, a major thoroughfare
and shopping hub in the neighborhood,
will get a makeover to make the street
more pedestrian friendly.
“I know there’s been a lot of concerns
about Steinway Street and making it a
better environment for pedestrians,” he
said. “The DOT will be creating a new
design to make the Steinway Street
corridor more pedestrian friendly and
safe and that plan will be brought to the
community board next year.”
Councilman Costa Constantinides,
who moderated the town hall, included
improvements to the street in his State
of the District speech in January.
The thoroughfare has been the scene
of 249 traffic-related injuries and 95
pedestrian injuries in the past five years.
Part of the problem, Constantinides
argued, is the configuration of the cross-walks.
The blocks along the street are
long, and many times pedestrians will
cross in the middle of the street to reach
a store instead of walking to the end of
a block to reach a crosswalk.
Though the DOT plan is still months
away from being presented to the com-munity,
Constantinides’ plan calls for
mid-block crosswalks, leading pedes-trian
intervals to give pedestrians more
time to cross the street and a plan to
make the corridor “the next great meet-ing
space in western Queens.”
He cited Union and Madison Squares
as examples that Astoria could imitate
and wants to include the community in
any ongoing discussion about the space.
De Blasio also acknowledged that
renovations for Steinway Library were
taking too long, calling the delay “unac-ceptable.”
“I know there are some things that the
government has not done so well and
some things that have taken too long
and have been frustrating and one is
the Steinway Library,” he said.
The renovation, he said, will officially
start in spring 2018. It includes a new
elevator, new entrance ramp, renovated
children’s room, a new self-checkout
unit, a new roof and cleaning the exterior
walls. According to the Queens Library
website, the $2.92 million project will
be completed in August 2019.
The plans also include renovations
to the children’s bathrooms, meeting
rooms and staff rooms, which will cost
$250,000. It is not clear when those
renovations will be complete.
The Parks Department also announced
that they will resolve the flooding issue at
Woodtree Park at 20th Avenue and 37th
Street, where residents have complained
that after rainfall, the basketball courts
become inundated with water.
Housing was also a discussion at the
town hall, where residents were con-cerned
about the over-development in
Astoria and neighboring Long Island City.
One resident asked about Astoria Cove,
a development on the waterfront that
has been delayed because of disputes
about the 421-a program, a tax incen-tive
that rewards developers for adding
some affordable housing to their projects.
According to Maria Torres-Springer,
commissioner for the Department of
Housing Preservation and Development,
the development is still stalled. But it is
the first development to be zoned un-der
the mayor’s Mandatory Inclusionary
Housing text amendment, which was
passed in the City Council last year.
This means that once the developers
begin work again, 25 percent of the 1,700
units must be affordable and stay affordable.
“They haven’t made a a lot of prog-ress
in terms of moving forward with
the project but the bottom line is when
it does happen it will at least have 25
percent affordable housing,” she said.
Photo courtesy of Mayoral Photography Office
