14 The QUEE NS Courier • MARCH 10, 2016 for breaking news visit www.qns.com Bayside THE COURIER/Photo by Alina High Suriel receives $1M for auditorium and field house restoration Senator Tony Avella presents a check to Principal Michael Athy and Bayside High School students By Erica Siudzinski editorial@qns.com/@QueensCourier Some big bucks are being put toward improvements THE COURIER/Photo by Erica Siudzinski Senator Tony Avella presents a check to Principal Michael Athy and Bayside High School students. More reports of illegal home conversions surface in Bayside near Crocheron Park By Alina Suriel editorial@qns.com/@QueensCourier Illegally converted buildings for sale and rent have been popping up all over Queens, and recently in Bayside. Community members with a sharp eye for real estate have continued to call attention to online listings for illegally converted homes in Queens. An illegal conversion is an alteration or modification of an existing building to create an additional housing unit without first obtaining approval from the New York City Department of Buildings, according to the agency’s website. Community blog Queens Crap recently featured two homes less than half a mile apart openly advertising illegally converted homes either for sale or recently sold in Bayside. One of the residences is a recently sold property located on 215th Street alongside Crocheron Park. The home is described on real estate listing sites Zillow and others as a legal two-family setup with three residential units above ground and two more in the basement, for a total of five separate living spaces. It reportedly has seven bedrooms and five bathrooms. According to the Department of Buildings website, residents have been calling in to report suspicions of construction on the site to create the extra units dating back from 1995. Since 1994, numerous building code violations have been recorded related to extra units built on the property. A representative of the agency confirmed that there are currently four open violations on the property related to occupancy contrary to approved use and construction work performed without a permit. A stop work order has been active on the property since 2001 for alterations done on the property without a permit. After the first post had been put up on the blog, Queens Crap was notified of a second home nearby which was also being marketed as an illegal conversion. The other residence is on 35th Avenue just down the block from Crocheron Park and is listed at an asking price of $848,000. The home is described on two separate websites as a legal two-family setup with three residential units which collect a monthly rental income of $2,000, $2,300 and $1,500. Despite the self-proclaimed illegal conversion mentioned in the online marketing, the property does not have any violations listed online with the Department of Buildings and had never received any citizen complaints of illegal conversion before being publicized online. A single complaint, which was called in after the blog posting, is still active after inspectors were not granted access to the home on their first visit on March 1. Illegally converted homes left unchecked often continue to flout the law by subdividing rooms over and over again throughout the years to reach absurd levels of overcrowding in a single space. QNS recently published a report on an illegally converted single-family home in Flushing, which was ordered vacant after an inspection uncovered 16 single rooms rented out to different tenants. The Buildings Department has been dealing with illegal conversions in Queens, often to little impact. A 2013 audit found that the agency was slow in responding to complaints and still had outstanding problems not resolved from earlier audits. At the time the department had received 22,129 illegal conversion complaints annually, with most coming from Queens. The city launched a task force that year to inspect illegal dwellings and illegal apartments for rent. Illegal conversions can be reported online or by calling 311. According to a representative of the Department of Buildings, the total number of illegal conversion complaints has remained largely the same since 2013. The total number in 2015 was 22,012 after a slight jump in 2014 to 23,559 complaints and inspectors were granted access to 39.9 percent of homes reported in complaints, down from 43 percent in 2013. at Bayside High School. As a part of the school’s 80th anniversary this month, state Senator Tony Avella visited Bayside High School on Friday morning to present Principal Michael Athy with a $1 million check earmarked for the restoration of the high school’s aging auditorium and athletic field house. Of the funds that Avella appropriated from discretionary funding for Bayside High School’s Capital Improvement Request, $750,000 will go toward bringing the auditorium up to date, while the remaining $250,000 will go toward restoring lockers, showers, bathrooms and the exterior appearance of a heavily used field house. “We’ve been working for the past few years to reinvigorate the music program,” Athy said. “Before you had Frank Sinatra and all these other schools, this was the school for art. You came here if you wanted to study music.” This restoration is part of a plan to bring the auditorium facilities into the 21st century. A new recording studio, sound system and 1,300 shiny new seats will replace the worn-down seating and the muddled, unclear sound system that, in recent years, has fallen to nearly inaudible levels for many audience members. For years, the auditorium has been used heavily for theatrical performances, concerts and cultural events. Athy noted that to serve their students and the greater community to the fullest extent, and to encourage interest in the school’s music and performing arts programs, the school “requires a renovated 21st-century auditorium performance space.” A community cornerstone for 80 years, the school sees great use not only from student groups on the evenings and weekends, but from the greater community as well. According to Athy, more than 50 community groups use the high school’s auditorium, gym and classrooms. “It’s not just your school,” he added. “It’s a community building on top of that.” As Avella tells it, this discretionary funding fell into his lap as a “windfall from the state.” The first thing he did was ask the schools what they needed. “What I do is I call the schools in my district and I ask them, ‘What’s your wishlist? Give me some ideas of what you need,’” Avella said. Athy and Avella found two projects on the list that added up to the million-dollar sum. Slated to start in January 2017, the project will temporarily shutter the auditorium. In the meantime, the school will shift assemblies and other meetings to several large classrooms. Avella noted that the restoration ties in nicely with the school’s 80th anniversary. He added that high schools were in dire need of discretionary funding from local politicians. “Elementary schools have a built-in constituency, so they tend to get more discretionary funds from local elected officials,” he said, explaining that high schools, because they draw from such a large constituency and numerous communities, experience a “shortfall” of discretionary funding. While budgets tend to allocate money for necessary building repair such as roof maintenance, building improvements or restorations are hard to come by. “I stopped by one day, and I told Athy, ‘By the way, I’m giving you $1 million,’” Avella said. “He had this blank look on his face.” “I only hear that every day,” joked Athy. The school will be celebrating its 80th anniversary this month, with a visit from Avella and a potential historical retrospective slated for this summer.
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