Janice Melnick, a Floral Park resident, is the newly appointed…
By Ayala Ben-Yehuda
Northeast Queens park enthusiasts have a new resource they can turn to with ideas on how to make the area’s 2,000 acres of parkland more accessible, beautiful and enjoyable for residents.
Janice Melnick, a Floral Park resident, is the newly appointed Parks Department administrator for northeast Queens. The brand new position, which Melnick filled at the end of May, was created to provide community outreach and long-range planning for the local city parks such as Alley Pond, Crocheron, John Golden, Little Bay Park, Udalls Cove Park Preserve and Fort Totten once it is transferred to the city.
“We were cleaning them, we were maintaining them, but there was no community outreach, no formalized plan of action,” said Melnick, a 20-year Parks veteran who most recently served as the borough’s chief of administrative services.
According to Q4U, an advocacy group for northeast Queens parks, the area contains more than a third of the parkland in the borough — about 2,000 acres — but the parkland remains underutilized.
Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and his Queens counterpart, Richard Murphy, “really felt that it was important to tie the parks in this area together,” said Melnick.
“While they have different uses…there was no one person the community could go to.”
Unlike Flushing Meadows Corona Park or Forest Park, northeast Queens parks such as Alley Pond had no separate administrator until now even though Alley Pond is the second-largest park in the borough, said Melnick.
The new administrator will work out of a musty Fort Totten office on a simple yet weighty to-do list that includes: lobbying politicians to appropriate funds for the parks; planning long-term renovations to park facilities; reaching out to civic groups to get feedback on park uses; organizing volunteers to conduct park clean-ups and other activities; and planning more events for the parks, such as children’s programs and perhaps a concert series.
“I want to make the community feel that the parks are theirs,” said Melnick. “We don’t really get much in this part of the world.”
Perhaps the most controversial park issue in northeast Queens is the future of Fort Totten, the former military base that has been divided between the Parks and Fire departments.
The conveyance of the land from the federal government to the city should be formally completed by fall, said Melnick.
Funds are needed to demolish 22 buildings on Parks property to make way for public parkland, she said. The 1950s-era barracks-style structures identified for demolition hold no historical significance, she said, though she emphasized that funding for their removal was far from imminent.
Melnick met several weeks ago with members of the Bay Terrace Community Alliance, who expressed concerns over parking and congestion in the area with the opening of Fort Totten to the public.
Melnick said the planned opening of a catering hall on the fort could bring more traffic, but that expansion of the nearby parking lot at Little Bay could help alleviate the problem.
“As long as there’s open lines of communication, we can find a solution,” said Melnick.
The northeast Queens parks administrator can be reached via e-mail at janice.melnick@parks.nyc.gov.
Reach reporter Ayala Ben-Yehuda by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 718-229-0300, Ext. 146.
