College Point is an incredibly interesting area. Tucked away from through traffic, it’s evolved a culture a bit different than other areas in Eastern Queens. Beautiful houses sit blocks from a concrete factory, a 100 year old butcher business are frequented by new immigrants, all next to the beautiful Queens Public Library at Poppenhusen. As we know, areas on the outskirts of the City are often forgotten, and College Point is not exception, with very little care for high quality street infrastructure.

What We Can Do

The Northern Queens Greenway (Queens Waterfront Greenway) is still just a general idea, without any specific route mapped out yet. As the biggest greenway advocates in the areas, we wanted to share a few possibilities of potential wins for the community, connecting kids to more parks and schools.

Segment 1 (in Red) – Extends Hermon A. MacNeil Park to the paths just east of it, using the City’s waterfront land.

Segment 2 (in Purple) – Connects to Powell’s Cove Park, with 0.1 mile total of infrastructure needed in front of the low traffic College point Yacht Club and then the use of the grass in front of the DEP Waste Treatment center.

Segment 3 (in Brown) – The two blocks of 138th Avenue are overly wide for a residential street, at about 50 feet over most of it. The DoT should be able to provide protected infrastructure here, without removing a full lane of parking to get to Frank Golden Park.

Connecting to the Community

From Frank Golden Park it’s possible to build infrastructure connecting both south and east.

Segment 4 (in Red) – Using the overly wide 132nd street and newly built Linden Place would give access to the College Point Fields and the huge commercial district. It’s a failure of government that the Linden Place design was not built with multiple transportation options, instead of solely being car focused. This would connect just over the highway to the thousands of kids in the Michell-Linden housing who don’t have good access to parkland, in addition to the amazing facilities at the Lewis Latimer House and Flushing Town Hall, with connection to Northern Boulevard and the heart of Flushing Main Street.

Segment 5 (in Blue) – Traveling along 15th Avenue and up 143rd street, we need to use 14th Avenue to get over the Whitestone Expressway. Luckily the bridge is about 70 feet wide (including sidewalks) so there is room.

Segment 6 (in Pink) – Traveling North and then East, the path can take some of the green space along the Cross Island Expressway and some of the excess capacity on the service roads. At some point it should shift from south of the highway to north of it, since there are only two on-ramps on the north side. This will end at Little Bay Park, that already has paths and is connected to Joe Michaels Mile and to the rest of the Eastern Queens Greenway.

Getting It Done

Although plans like this require incredibly small amounts of funding in comparison to any other infrastructure work in New York City, they do require a little political will. These project can be done quickly, mainly with paint and a little asphalt, but all using land we already own (the DoT obviously doesn’t do eminent domain for greenway projects in Eastern Queens).

Where these projects get slowed down are small but loud groups that try to stop all progress. Our City listens to them too much, and doesn’t consider the thousands of kids today that stay in their basements playing video games because they don’t have a safe way to use their parkland. We have a huge amount of park space in Flushing Meadows, Kissena, Cunningham, Alley Pond, Crocheron and Fort Totten. All we need to do is create safe ways to get there…and to do that we need to vote in politicians that are more interested in getting things done (and less interest in not making waves).

Should we implement the above route? No, we should push DoT to study the area and find an even better route for the entire community (instead of what they normally do, which is only building in areas away from the loudmouths). But what we do need to demand is that a route is built; connecting our communities should be a top priority for anyone our tax dollars are paying for.

Why Now?

We often hear pushback against projects like this, asking why they’re really needed. People who drive everywhere often can’t imagine cycling as part of their routine, so they assume no one is doing it.

On Friday, September 19th a cyclist was run over by a car on 150th and 41st Ave. One of our members who passed by the scene said the cyclists was speaking; we hope this crash wasn’t fatal. This is only blocks away from the proposed route. Just in the time between when we wrote this article and we published it, a cyclist was run over near the infrastructure we were proposing.

We often hear “it won’t get fixed until someone gets hurt”. It often still doesn’t get fixed when people get hurt. Now is not the time to build this greenway; it should have been done generations ago. But let’s not let their failing continue as more people get hurt.