Woodhaven senior center saved

Every day, Joseph Palladino, 86, tries to kiss as many women as possible. Like himself, the women he kisses are members of the Forest Park Senior Citizens Center, at 91st Street and 89th Avenue in Woodhaven. Making up the majority of the Center’s membership, these women enjoy Palladino’s generous hand and cheek kisses. Palladino’s kisses, or shots of Vitamin K as he calls them, are one of many things that attract these women to Forest Park. They say the spacious Center, whose brown wooden walls give it a cottage-like feel, is their salvation from loneliness and boredom. So they’re happy that after months of financial worries Forest Park has now escaped closure, at least for this fiscal year, due to the restoration of its funding announced on Tuesday, October 15.
“It’s been Christmas,” said Donna Caltabiano, executive director of Forest Park. “I’m speechless.”
The announcement about the restored money came shortly after another one – that Forest Park would lose 70 percent of its funding, which would have forced it to close, Caltabiano said.
The restored money, $100,000 per year, is discretionary funding from Borough President Helen Marshall, which the Center has been receiving for over 10 years. But a few weeks ago, the Department for the Aging (DFTA), which has authority over the amount of money Forest Park receives, cut this funding, said Dan Andrews, spokesperson for the Borough President.
The DFTA did that because it wants Forest Park and the other senior centers to start competing for their city funding; this is part of the Department’s current restructuring intended to make the process of allocating money to centers as fair as possible, said Chris Miller, DFTA spokesperson.
This competitive process in effect means that certain centers’ applications will be rejected and these centers will likely have to close because all the applicants are competing for the same pool of money, explained Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy for the Council of Senior Centers and Services, a membership organization of senior service agencies in the city.
Caltabiano said she’s planning to apply for competitive funds, the deadline for which will be in the coming months, but for now she’s relieved that the Mayor’s Office has honored the Borough President’s request to restore money to the Center this year.
A day before Forest Park found out that it would be getting back its money, it received emergency state funding, $75,000, from Senator Serphin Maltese, who represents the area, to stay open for a year.
With this injection of state and city dollars, Forest Park’s finances are now secure until the end of this fiscal year, June 2009, Caltabiano explained.
Palladino, the provider of Vitamin K and also the president of the Center’s board of directors, said closing down would have been “a tragic thing.”
“Coming to a place like this keeps you going,” said Palladino, who is one of the 40 to 60 people a day that visit the Center. “Without a place like this I would sit at home and wind up in a nursing home,” explained Palladino, whose wife died in 2004.
Palladino, of Woodhaven, is at Forest Park all the time, often sitting at Caltabiano’s desk, listening to Bloomberg radio. “I listen to the markets,” he said.
And of course another thing he does while there is kissing women. He likes to joke that he needs to do that in order to exercise his lips because he has arthritis of the lips.
“He [Palladino] is hot stuff,” said Frances Day, 87, a member of Forest Park. “We love it here; it’s our second home,” she said, explaining that without the Center her days would be much emptier because both her son and husband are dead. That’s why she doesn’t mind the daily commute from Jamaica, where she lives.
One of Day’s favorite activities at Forest Park is playing bingo with the other seniors. “You’ve got your friends here; you wanna stay here. I hope they don’t get rid of this place,” she said.
Like Palladino and 14 other members, Day values the Center so much that she has been lending money to it to help it survive. By the end of every spring, Forest Park is almost out of money and the funding from the Borough President’s Office typically comes in during the fall, explained Caltabiano. So, when Day and the other seniors each lend the Center $1,000, it helps endure the summers, Caltabiano added. When the city funds arrive, Caltabiano pays the seniors back.
“I like the Center and they need the money. Instead of being in the bank, I gave it to the Center,” Day said.
The seniors get more than satisfaction for their loans. Each donor also gets to have their name written on the back of their seat.
The idea to create VIP seats in return for loans originated a few years ago when two seniors were arguing over a seat. Then Caltabiano stepped in and said, “Give me a $1,000 and the seat is yours.”