Maam On A Mission

Gertrude Gonesh stepped out of her house and looked around her deserted neighborhood. "You see what they did to my car?" she asked, pointing to a Saturn parked in front of her house. "They vandalized it, wrote Z-Unit on all the windows. Im not even sure what it means. Someone broke my windshield here once too. Another time someone put dead black cats in my yard." She stood on the sidewalk dressed in slippers, sweat pants and a plain blue shirt, a model of apathy. "These are the types of things that happen to you when youre an activist," she sighed. "It comes with the territory."
Gertrude Gonesh is a familiar name to state officials and business leaders around southeast Queens. For the past couple of years shes been playing her own version of "I Spy" with the company, Cross County Recycling, a waste transfer station that hauls and dumps city trash in and out of the neighborhood. The company, which has maintained the same address at 122-52 Montauk Street in Springfield Gardens for 25 years, is in the center of a storm of accusations that it polluted and caused a health panic in the vicinity of Nellis Street, Nashville Boulevard and Montauk Street, all one block away from the waste company.
Residents claim rats and cats twice their normal size have overtaken the neighborhood. The stench from the garbage is so strong they wont leave their homes. Theyre afraid their area is being used as a dumping ground for the citys garbage. Other problems have also surfaced.
"You see that house there?" Gonesh asked during an interview last Thursday afternoon, pointing to a cottage style home that looked like it was plucked from the pages of Architectural Digest. "It has cancer. And that house there? Cancer. That house across the street? Lupus. On my block alone I have five cancers. Now, over there, the man died from cancer, and here, another person died from cancer."
For the past two years, Gonesh, equipped with only a Fugi camera and a reformers attitude, has shot hundreds of pictures and prepared daily logs documenting suspected criminal behavior from the company. Shes made tape recordings of the stations noise volumes and sent her findings to the Department of Sanitation and other environmental agencies.
Gonesh is a retired educator with the New York City Board of Education, but she hasnt really slowed downshes found a new cause to work toward. John Persichilli, one of the heads of Cross County, Inc., believes that in retirement, shes lost her marbles. "Shes out of her mind," he said. "She has nothing better to do with her time. Pretty soon everyone is going to be sued for what theyre saying about this company. Everything she says is a lie."
But a lot of important people are listening, including Governor George Pataki, who for a three-month period two years ago shut the waste station down, according to Gonesh. As block president, and it is a small block, Gonesh has enlisted other politicians, such as Assemblyman William Scarborough of the 29th AD and State Senator Malcolm Smith, to pressure the Department of Sanitation to monitor Cross Countys activities.
Fines of $160,000 from inspection violations recently closed the company down again, but Gonesh isnt satisfied. She wants the doors padlocked and the keys thrown away. "Whenever the city closes it down, it just reopens minutes later," she said. "Just the other day men were on the roof working on it. It doesnt look closed to me." Despite the presence of sanitation inspectors regularly dispatched to the site, Gonesh believes Cross County is still operating illegally.
Her claims may be starting to fall on deaf ears, however, because some city officials are beginning to see her as the lady who "cried wolf," complaining even when there isnt a problem. "Cross-County really is not a badly run company," said Thomas Kunkel, a specialist for the chief of the New York Department of Sanitation. "Theyve been fined by the city for violations like for not renewing their permit which theyre required to do every year. But the other fines they received were for violations within the facility. That place is so closely regulated; weve been there on almost a daily basis. We check their records. We check everything. My job is to help the public. If Cross County is doing anything bad, then Ill send someone out to take care of the problem, like were already doing."
Kunkel sees Gonesh as nothing more than a determined pest. "Even though the place is shut down now, shes still complaining about it," he said. "She sends me pictures and notes saying I saw a truck go into the building and the doors were open. I mean, what does that mean? That could be a couple of guys in there sitting down for a cup of coffee."
Anyone looking at a map of Queens would be hard pressed to find Nellis Street, a short strip of residential property that ultimately leads to a dead end. Here, amid scrap iron businesses and used car dealerships, the neighborhood is practically being held hostage to Cross County Inc., a predicament that, according to Assemblyman Scarborough, seems to be rampant in mostly minority neighborhoods, where most waste stations are located.
"On a hot day, you cant even keep the windows open over there," said Scarborough, who chaired a forum addressing these problems on October 24 at York College. "The close proximity of the people who have cancer next to the waste station is pretty damning testimony. Half of these facilities are concentrated in Jamaicatoo often in minority communities. We cant allow these places to be dumping grounds for the city. People are getting pretty frustrated."
And nobody is more upset than Gertrude Gonesh. "No matter what they dono matter what threats they inflict on my yard, like the black dead cats, the broken windshield of my car today they wrote something on my car," Gonesh said. "I am not going to give up. This is my familys house and were going to enjoy it. This house is paid for. Ive accomplished the American dream to own something, and I should be able to enjoy it. Im here to stay."