By Alex Christodoulides
Residents who live just south of the St. John's University campus have found themselves going in circles since May 23, when the school closed a gate to part of 82nd Avenue, which connects the area to Utopia Parkway.
The avenue forms the southeastern boundary of the Jamaica university's campus and an auxiliary parking lot, where townhouses for students and priests are under construction. St. John's said the closure was necessary to do environmental work on the townhouses and that it will probably reopen the gate in the week of June 16.
The gate closure means that to go east from 82nd Avenue to reach Utopia Parkway, residents must take the Grand Central Parkway service road west to 168th Street, head north to Union Turnpike and east to Utopia, making a big circle of what used to be a short hop.
What local residents may not have known is that the easternmost block of three-block-long 82nd Avenue, between 175th Street and Utopia Parkway, is not a city street, the city Department of Transportation said.
No actions involving the street have been taken of late, a Department of City Planning spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail. In other words, closing that block of 82nd Avenue does not require city permission.
Community Board 8 Chairwoman Marie Adam-Ovide said she verified with Queens Borough Hall that that block belongs to St. John's.
"That gate they can close because it's their property and has been since 1954," she said. "They did inform us Thursday afternoon that they would close the street — not the gate — but the letter they sent did not have a start and end date [for the closure]."
So the May 23 gate closure was a surprise to many. A resident e-mailed the TimesLedger that "security from St. John's said they informed the community with fliers, which were earlier distributed," but nobody had received anything, and the closure had caught people unaware.
St. John's said the decision to close the gate came from the developer and city Department of Buildings in order to do underground environmental work safely.
"Ninety percent of the time, the gate is open to the community. This time we had no choice but to close it because of the work," said St. John's spokesman Dominic Scianna. "The gate should be open prior to the completion of the dorms. We've just closed it for a couple weeks during construction, until about the week of June 16. It is our property. What's closed now is the auxiliary parking lot."
Residents do not understand why the closure was necessary on that date.
"During this Memorial Day weekend, no construction work has been undertaken in the closed area," one resident wrote in an e-mail.
Kevin Forrestal, the Hillcrest Estates Civic Association president, said residents are talking with a lawyer to see if 50 years of public use of the street could mean the public has a right to continue using it as such.
