The City's Future And Your Health

BY JULIET WERNER
Climate Change Changes City Planning
The Aug. 8 storm left homes and businesses across the borough destroyed. On the heels of a phone call from Congressman Joe Crowlely (D-Jackson Heights), the President declared Queens a federal disaster area. And Queensites, on their way to apply for assistance, wondered aloud if the problem might largely be solved by cleaning the streets’ catch basins more regularly.

Bloomberg announces PlaNYC at Queens Museum of Art.

At community board meetings, attendees were united in claiming that clogged catch basins were behind the severe flooding and that the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency responsible for maintaining them, was to blame.

Nearly two months after the storm, Department of Environmental Commissioner Emily Lloyd presented her testimony before City Council.

“This morning I would like first to put our recent weather and the resulting flooding in the context of climate change as we currently understand it, and tell you how we are incorporating research on climate change into our planning,” Lloyd said. “Events like Aug. 8 show us that we have to take action before climatic change predictions are as certain or precise as we would prefer.”

Taking climate change into consideration is a trademark of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s administration. The Mayor first began hinting at PlaNYC, a comprehensive sustainability plan for the City’s future, at an event hosted by the League of Conservation right here in Queens at the Museum of Art back in December of 2006.

Then, on Earth Day 2007, Bloomberg outlined the specifics.

“We need to increase open space, expand housing, deal with our congested roadways, create better mass transit options, increase our energy sources and stabilize our water supply or we simply won’t be able to continue the high quality of life we now enjoy,” Bloomberg said. “If we act now, we’ll have a better future, a better quality of life, and more importantly, our children and their children will too.”

Councilman Eric Gioia introduces the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway in 2006, which will link 13 city parks with a series of hiking and biking trails. It stretches from Flushing Meadows - Corona Park to Fort Totten and Clearview Park in Bayside.

The initiatives included in PlaNYC address the City’s five key dimensions: land, water, transportation, energy and air. 2030 is still years away, but the state of health in Queens has already improved as a result of the Mayor’s vision. Work is underway on Water Tunnel 3, congestion pricing is being tweaked at the state and City level and cleaner power plants are being constructed. But if there’s one way PlaNYC has already affected the health of New Yorkers it is through the various Open Space Initiatives.

II. Escaping The Crowd
By 2030, 9 million people will call New York City home and the Mayor is determined to provide them all with space for recreation and relaxation. Ensuring that all New Yorkers live within a ten-minute walk of a park tops the list of initiatives included in PlaNYC.

In order to make existing sites available to more New Yorkers, the plan is to open schoolyards as public playgrounds, increase options for competitive athletics and complete underdeveloped parks. In addition, the City will expand usable hours at existing sites by providing more multi-purpose fields and installing new lighting. Finally, the public realm will be reinvented by establishing more public plazas and greening the cityscape.

III. From Schoolyard to Public Playground
For many children living in Queens, school is the only time physical activity is available. Physical Education requirements, mandated by the State, are frequently ignored, placing an even greater burden on the City to provide free and easily accessible facilities.

Volunteers plant street trees.

Working in conjunction with the Trust for Public Land, the Mayor’s office has committed $111 million toward opening 290 schoolyards in under-served neighborhoods. These playgrounds will be open after school, on weekends and even during school vacations. The mayor expects that by 2030, 360,000 New York children will be utilizing these playgrounds.

In July of last year, the first 69 of these playgrounds opened. In Queens, schoolyards at PS 101, PS 228, PS 58, IS 73, PS 60, PS 254, PS 161 and PS 223 were treated to makeovers. The remaining Queens schoolyards, scattered evenly throughout the borough, are set to be ready by 2010.

IV. Old Favorites Get a Makeover
At a breakfast held Oct. 18 at Forest Park’s Oak Ridge, Department of Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe outlined the Department’s accomplishments and goals. He joined the first corps of Parks & Recreation’s Urban Park Rangers and now, almost 30 years later, he is delighted to be heading up the Department at a time of unprecedented expansion.

“Perhaps most significantly, [PlaNYC] provides $400 million to restore eight major parks that have never realized their full potential,” Benepe said before outlining plans intended for Queens’ Highland Park and Rockaway Park, which will receive $46 million and $36 million respectively.

Highland Park is distinguished by the Ridgewood Reservoir, which was used until 1959. Today, its three basins are overgrown. PlaNYC has determined that two of the three basins will be set aside as a nature preserve and the largest will be converted into a 60-acre recreation center.

Rockaway Park rehabilitation will consist mainly of creating beachfront facilities to better serve the new residents expected to be attracted to the area as a result of the Arverne-by-the-Sea project.

School yard at PS 121 is slated to become a playground.

“We will engage in a planning effort with the surrounding commu¬nity to develop green spaces, outdoor recre¬ational centers with opportunities for all ages, and sports facilities—such as for soccer and cricket—that reflect the shifting recreation interests of today’s New Yorkers,” the Mayor’s plan reads in part.

Improving rundown parks will play an important role in ensuring that Queens residents are getting the recreation necessary for a healthy lifestyle.

V. The Borough Is Only Getting Greener
Another component of the Mayor’s ambitious PlaNYC agenda is to plant and care for one million new trees across the City’s five boroughs during the next decade. In doing so, the City will increase its tree cover by 20 percent and improve quality of life. The City is set to plant 60 percent of trees and the remaining 40 percent will come from private organizations, community organizations and homeowners.

The project launched in October of last year in the Bronx.

“PlaNYC is one of the most comprehensive initiatives to enhance an urban environment ever undertaken by an American city, and Million Trees NYC is an important part of it,” Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff said at the October kickoff event. “New York City has some of the greatest parks and most beautiful tree-lined streets in the world, but we also have too many neighborhoods and streets without sufficient coverage. Million Trees NYC will change that and will go a long way to help us create a green, sustainable New York City.”

Commissioner Adrian Benepe, City Parks Foundation Executive Director David Rivel, Partnerships for Parks Director Jason Schwartz, New York Restoration Project Executive Director Drew Becher, Assembly Member Ellen Young and Council Member John C. Liu plant a sassafras tree at Kissena Corridor Park—one of 3,000 planted at the park for It’s My Park! Day.

On April 12, the not-for-profit organization New York Cares is sponsoring a tree planting day at various sites throughout the City. Queens locations have not yet been announced, but will soon be posted on www.handsonnewyorkday.org.

VI. Healthy Development
In PlaNYC, the mayor also outlines his strategy for cleaning up the City’s 7,600 acres of contaminated land. According to the Mayor’s office, all five boroughs contain sites that may be contaminated as a result of an old factory or gas station or even a dry cleaner that used hazardous chemicals.
Here in Queens, the cleaning up process has already started. For example, the Shops at Atlas Park was at one point a toy factory that released chemicals, which significantly spoiled the surrounding soil and groundwater.

Portions of Jamaica have been designated as a brownfield cleanup area and $420,000 has been directed to the effort.

VI. A Stroll Can’t Hurt
It’s no secret that Queens residents are largely opposed to Congestion Pricing, just one of many initiatives included in PlaNYC. Community Boards across the borough have expressed their concerns and tension is mounting. In times of stress, why not relax in a nearby park. There may soon be one a 10-minute walk away.