Update on Wendy's site

From Brownstoner Queens:

A 115-unit apartment building is in the works for the corner of Reeder Street and Queens Boulvard in Elmhurst. The site is right across from the new rental building known as The Elm as well as the Grand Avenue/Newtown R stop. DOB documents state that the building will include 27,801 square feet of commercial space, 26,273 square feet of community space, and 93,940 square feet of residential space. It’ll rise seven stories tall. The DOB disapproved a building plan earlier this summer and has not yet issued permits. We’ll letcha know when they do…

This is the Wendy's site. And if you know anything about the development that's occurred along that stretch, you know those new buildings are mostly empty.

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Civic Virtue's spot still noisy

From the Daily News:

The controversial statue, “Triumph of Civic Virtue,” is long gone from its perch on Queens Blvd. — but its noisy legacy remains.

Every eight minutes, the loud wail of bird screeches blares from an electronic device mounted at the statue’s former site — a poop-reduction system that has long outlived the structure it was designed to save.

“It's terrible this noise,” said Debra Mays, 50. “I walk here everyday after work and I am telling you, this is annoying.”

The News contacted the city to ask why the box is still operating nearly nine months after the statue was moved to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery — prompting the Department of Citywide Administrative Services to say it would remove the device in the coming weeks.

Until then, the box will continue to emit two sounds — one inaudible to the human ear and another which is a random mix of birds of prey.

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Trylon Theater & Tower Diner block advertised as hi-rise development site

Trylon Portfolio

A special thank you to former City Council Member and current Queens Machine-backed Queens Borough Presidential candidate Melinda Katz for making sure the LPC rejected the landmarking application.

Quote: In an interview with the Daily News, Katz explained that she was not disappointed in Tierney's decision, and thanked him for taking a "very careful look" at the Trylon issue. She added that the Trylon had been modified too much from its original look, with the theater's interior and marquee having been redone in 1984 and 1994, respectively. "I never thought that this was a building suitable for landmarking," Katz said. "I guess I'm just happy that he [Tierney] made a decision, and now we move on.

Actually, the facade of the building was what activists sought for landmarking, and that's the only part of a building the LPC can designate, unless it's open to the public, which this wasn't. As for the marquee, it's very unlikely that it would not be replaced over time. It hasn't stopped countless other landmark designations of theaters. The facade was 100% intact. Melinda knows this. She'd rather have development on Queens Blvd than preservation. Enjoy much more of this type of behavior should she enter Borough Hall and make the entire borough the Katz litter box.

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Judge's wife abuses parking placard

From the Daily News:

For weeks, a green Honda Accord has been parked nearly every day on Queens Blvd. near 83rd Ave. in Kew Gardens in Queens, N.Y., neighbors say, but its driver never feeds the meter.
She never moves for alternate-side parking. And she never seems to get a ticket.

That’s because Ellen Raffaele — a mid-level Queens Board of Elections employee with deep ties to the borough’s Democratic machine — is improperly using the official parking placard issued to her husband, a judge.

Queens Supreme Court Justice Thomas Raffaele is entitled to a state-issued parking placard as a sitting jurist — but only if he’s using the car for official court business.

Letting his wife use the placard — which says “POLICE” beside the seal of the State of New York’s judicial branch — is a blatant abuse of the perk and one that infuriated people desperately seeking parking in the busy municipal district near the main Queens courthouse, borough hall and other city offices.

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Columbia pushes for lots more development

From the Wall Street Journal:

In the coming decades, New York could confront a problem many cities would love to have: too many people and nowhere to put them.

The city is expected to add one million more residents by 2040, but there likely won't be room for hundreds of thousands of them unless a small city of new housing is built, according to a report by a Columbia University think tank.

The most logical location for all this new housing: the city's waterfront neighborhoods, including Long Island City and Willets Point in Queens, Red Hook in Brooklyn and the Financial District, according to the report by the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University.

Whether residents want more apartments in their neighborhoods remains to be seen. In places such as Williamsburg where Bloomberg administration rezonings brought new residents, the result has been subway cars so packed that commuters wait for several trains to pass, lengthy kindergarten wait lists and promised parks that have yet to be delivered. The city has also yet to master the art of making tightly packed blocks of new glass towers feel like neighborhoods, rather than sterile enclaves.

Finding places for new people in the city isn't as simple as putting development in less-dense neighborhoods. More than a quarter of the city's housing is in single-family structures, meaning there's still plenty of room to go up to accommodate more people.

But in many of those areas prices aren't high enough to justify the cost of building new 40-story towers. It's unclear, for example, whether there's enough demand for the 10,000 to 15,000 units the report said could be accommodated along Queens Boulevard, a 12-lane thoroughfare through the heart of the borough.

That much of the development would be along the waterfront raises serious questions after superstorm Sandy, when residents in Lower Manhattan, Long Island City and Red Hook were out of their homes for weeks or months.

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Just what are they building at Wendy's?

Hi, just wanted to pass this further info along to you. One, the developers threw up a plywood construction fence yesterday that also extends halfway into the public sidewalk, I've attached two pics of it. I've sent a complaint via 311 about it, but that will probably go nowhere...

Also, the city approved merging both of the tax lots into one large tax lot now, Block 1549, Lot 28. Putting that in pulls up the old 85-15 Queens Blvd address, but the info field tells you it's been combined and a new address is issued.


Also, the old addresses of these two lots don't give any results on the DOB BIS system anymore (such as Wendy's old 85-07 Queens Blvd). The new address for the whole lot is now 51-35 Reeder St.

And BTW, the plan was resubmitted for that 7-story condo and is pending now under the new address on BIS. Also, it calls for over 325 parking spaces, both below ground and also an above ground, stackable car parking lot business in the the disapproved plans.

Who knows what is being resubmitted again. I even sent an email to the Queens Borough President's Office about this, twice, over a month ago and never received a reply back. I even dug through their useless QBP website and sent the same email to the QBP Planning Director, a J Choi, no reply either.

You know, a brother would start to think something's going on here!

Finally, using the City's Tax Map, you can see the old streams and other artifacts from the previous maps, listed as "Relics" on the tax maps or the old tax maps. You can check it out here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/property/property_info_taxmaps.shtml#.

Justin

325 cars?

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