Overgrown medians and trash-strewn streets across Queens are raising quality-of-life concerns among residents throughout the borough.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards held a press conference on Tuesday, Aug. 13, urging city agencies to address the neglected medians throughout the borough. Standing in front of an overgrown median at Braddock Avenue near 221st Place, Richards presented a series of photographs showcasing the littered and unkempt medians in various Queens neighborhoods.
Civic leaders from all over Queens presented a united front with Richards as he announced legislation he co-created with Council Member Linda Lee (D-23) aimed at reforming how the city handles median upkeep.
The legislation would centralize median upkeep to the Department of Transportation (DOT) and require the agency to clean every median in the city at least once a year. It would also mandate that the DOT create a public database allowing residents to see when medians were last cleaned. Richards said he first introduced the legislation in 2018 as a city council member.
Over the past few months, Tim Chubinidze, director of civic engagement at the borough president’s office, created a database of 205 median sites in Queens. The sites were covered in overgrown trees, garbage and weeds, and about half were concentrated in eastern Queens. Beyond eastern Queens, roads in Astoria, East Elmhurst, Woodside, Fresh Meadows and Far Rockaway were also affected. “What all this tells us is that the city has a maintenance problem and a reporting problem, and I’m tired of both,” Richards said.
Richards explained that currently, an “arcane memorandum” between three organizations – the NYC DOT, New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) and New York City Parks Department (DPR) – deems said organizations are responsible for the upkeep.
Richards said the overgrowth leads to safety issues for motorists and pedestrians, as it impedes their vision when crossing the street and driving on the roadways.
“Here we are on Braddock Avenue, one of Queens Village’s busiest roadways. The medians up and down the street have weeds just as tall as me. What’s even worse is on the way here, we saw a mother on the other side of Springfield Boulevard trying to navigate crossing the street with her child,” he said.
Some civic leaders said that filing complaints has gotten them nowhere.
“We’ve been filing complaints with 311, and guess what? The next day, the complaint is closed, and it states ‘condition not found.’ I don’t know if they sent a blind person to look, but I’m pretty sure the condition has not changed,” said Marie Adam-Ovide, district manager of Community Board 8. “I do not like seeing these unsightly things all around the borough in my neighborhood and in the district that I represent,” she said.
Adam-Ovide said she and her neighbors took matters into their own hands and held a cleanup event for a median in their district this summer.
Other civic leaders said the medians are an eyesore in their communities.
Florence Kouloris, district manager of Community Board 1, which represents Astoria, said that motorists coming off the Grand Central Parkway are met with a “traumatic experience.” “The first thing you see now on 91st Street is a wreck. People are coming off airplanes and joining our community to have filthy, dirty, messy medians that are never maintained,” she said.
“It’s terrible. There’s a median on Winchester Boulevard that’s nice and wide and overgrown, and invites people to hang out and drink their alcohol and throw their bottles. There’s always broken glass,” added Suzanne Peritz, president of the Rocky Hill Civic Association.
Some leaders said that the median overgrowths cause a grey area in assigning an agency responsible for cleaning.
“If it’s a Green Street, we call DOT, if it’s just a regular median, we call sanitation, if it has a city tree on it, we’re supposed to call [NYC Parks],” said Joseph Marziliano, district manager of Community Board 11. “But then you have situations here, like this block, where wild scrub trees have grown. We get all of these mix-ups where there’s really no good agency to call. We just don’t know where to turn.”
Richards said that consistency is key across city agencies for median upkeep.
He urged Mayor Adams to fully fund the Lot Cleaning Division within DSNY to help clean up the medians. “This is an opportunity to scale up the workforce of Queens County and our city. As we talk about entry-level positions in agencies, this is a huge opportunity to make that happen,” he said.
Richards said that the unkempt medians have been an ongoing issue since the last mayoral administration. He added that former mayor Bill de Blasio put more resources into cleanups. “This is absolutely the worst I’ve ever seen it around the borough. I would say arguably, at one point, it would be certain parts of Queens,” he said. “Now, it’s everywhere.”
