By the TimesLedger
After 10 years of inexcusable neglect, intrepid state Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn (D-Fresh Meadows) is about to get the Long Island Rail Road to do the right thing at its abandoned station in Richmond Hill. The station closed five years ago, but Community Board 9 has been complaining about the property for more than 20 years.
According to the board, the homeless have made the area under the LIRR tracks into a shantytown strewn with decades of debris. For a while the MTA leased the property to a local funeral home that used the lot for parking. That lease ended when the LIRR became concerned that the trestles were beginning to weaken.
Mayersohn, who has only represented this area of Queens since Jan. 1 thanks to redistricting, secured $75,000 in state funding to clean the site and install a high security fence. That’s an accomplishment for which the Richmond Hill Community is rightfully grateful, especially in a year when the state is facing an enormous deficit. But it doesn’t explain years of neglect at the hands of the Long Island Rail Road.
The triangular property on Hillside Avenue, Lefferts Boulevard and Babbage Street is located in the middle of a proposed historic district that would include the newly landmarked Republican Club building, Richmond Hill Library and Simonson’s Funeral Home. In other words this eyesore is in the very heart of Richmond Hill.
It is inconceivable that the MTA would have allowed this to happen in Oyster Bay or Manhasset or any of the towns that it serves in Long Island. Such neglect would not have been tolerated for a week, let alone 20 years. But even to this day, the MTA won’t say when the cleanup will be done and the new fence installed. Nor does it offer any explanation for the years of neglect.
What would never be tolerated in Nassau or Suffolk counties cannot be tolerated in Queens. Mayersohn is off to a good start in her new district. Now we hope she will hold the feet of the MTA honchos to the fire and make them commit to a date when the cleanup of this site will be completed. The residents of Richmond Hill deserve at least that much.
Editorial: Whose problem?
At a recent meeting at the Carlton House, state Attorney General Elliot Spitzer got an earful from preachers who complained that there are too many “community facilities” in southeast Queens. These facilities include everything from group homes for the mentally retarded and juvenile delinquents to halfway houses and drug treatment centers. Like other parts of the borough, the communities of southeast Queens believe they have been asked to shoulder more than their share of the borough's social burden.
Spitzer agreed that the distribution of community facilities needs to be equitable. But that is easier said than done. There are some communities in Queens that have proportionally fewer facilities, but this is often because the real estate is either too expensive or just not available.
To be sure, no one who has invested their life savings in a home wants to see a halfway house or methadone clinic open on the same block. This is as true in South Jamaica as it is in Douglaston.
Nevertheless, to hear the complaint about group homes come from church leaders is disconcerting. If the churches turn their backs on the drug addicts, the delinquents, the homeless and the mentally retarded, who will stand for them?
Not one pastor said society should do less for the borough's downtrodden; they just don’t want it done in their neighborhoods.
