1985

Carol Bellamy tries to win support in Forest Hills for a race against Ed Koch, who won.

The Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Development Corporation was formed to act as the advocacy arm of the park and make it “a multi-purpose recreational facility,” which the group said included bringing Grand Prix auto racing to Queens by September. Environmentalists and park users opposed the idea, and race sponsors eventually had to find another venue....

Carol Bellamy, then City Council President, kicked off her campaign for the mayoralty at a Long Island City high school, saying Mayor Ed Koch was unduly dedicated to Manhattan....A City study showed that Flushing Bay would continue to stink until sewage – 16 million gallons of it a day – was prevented from leaking from sewers. It suggested the Army Corps of Engineers dredge the Bay first until designs for an upgraded sewer system could be prepared....

Four Flushing storeowners claimed that members of the Chinese gang Killers and White Tigers had extorted protection money from them, a problem that was thought to be the confined to Manhattan. Investigators claimed that up to 40 merchants were in the same boat....

Councilman Ed Sadowsky called it quits after 23 years, spurring a heated battle for his seat. District leader John Roe received Democratic Committee backing and the backing of State Senator Leonard Stavisky — until Stavisky’s wife, Toby, entered the race and Roe backed out. But Julia Harrison took the backing of most local officials and won....

May began with the sounds of protests outside the 106th Precinct house in South Ozone Park as a grand jury began hearing testimony in the “stun gun” torture cases... Four-and-a-half-years-worth of repairs began on the No. 7 IRT-Flushing subway line, ending express service to and from Manhattan for the foreseeable future... Warner Amex and American Cablevision received approval from the Bureau of Franchises to begin construction that would bring cable TV to Queens by late 1985.

City Councilman Ed Sadowsky speaks at a school board meeting. He stepped down from the City Council in 1985 and was replaced by Julia Harrison.

Queens Inner Unity, the group that was supposed to hook up south Queens, still had not submitted financing agreements... Citicorp announced it was considering a 50-story office complex in Long Island City. Coming on the heels of the $500 million Hunters Point development and other waterfront revivals, this caused Queens County director of Economic Development Kay Kynion to say the county is on the verge of “the biggest development in New York City since Rockefeller Center.”...

A storm ushered in September and left thousands without electricity in central Queens, knocking down 400 trees. Six weeks later, Hurricane Gloria knocked out 4,000 phones and left 20,000 Queens homes in the dark....The Queens County Democratic Machine flexed its muscles by leading Mayor Ed Koch, Comptroller Harrison Goldin and Andrew Stein to victories in the borough’s primaries. All three won in every district....

Parents of children attending PS 195 picketed the school and kept their children home in protest of a city plan to allow a second grader with AIDS to attend class. The school boards in the area claimed the city had not implemented federal guidelines to deal with AIDS children in the school and eventually sued the city…

As expected, Democrats landslided into City offices Nov. 5, led by Borough President Manes, who was elected to a fourth term… Former vice-presidential candidate and Queens Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro made a “final and unequivocal decision” and declined to enter the race for the Democratic nomination to oppose Alfonse D’Amato for United States Senate. She claimed a Justice Department investigation into her 1978 campaign finances and financial disclosures made such a race unfair to her constituents and to the Democratic Party....

Justice William C. Brennan became the first Queens County judge to be convicted of bribery. He served 26 months in prison. He resigned, but planned to appeal his conviction.

Marty Lipp

After serving as editor of the Tribune, Marty left to write for and edit the Staten Island Advance, returned to News Communications to be editor and publisher of Our Town, worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for 10 years and is currently Communications Director for Harlem Children’s Zone, an educational and social services agency.

I always think of the mice. When I was managing editor of the Tribune in the 1980s (as a child prodigy of course), its twinned offices were in a shopping center on Kissena Boulevard, shoehorned between a pet store and a supermarket.

The “newsroom,” which consisted of two desks, was right up against the glass window facing the parking lot and myself and Gabriel Escobar, our city editor, were – to our occasional concern – splayed out in plain view like the Christmas displays at Saks Fifth Avenue.

For Gabe and I, these were our first jobs in journalism. We were like kids who had been handed the keys to the car, but hadn’t really learned how to drive yet. So, of course, we were full of the fuel of youthful energy and caromed out each week to race against the big boys and make the paper as great as our ink-filled dreams.

But as busy as we were, we couldn’t help noticing the goings-on just outside our oversized window. Mostly it was the unspectacular stuff of life in Queens. Kids being kids and being chided for it. The well-fed looking for something to eat. People looking back and forth across the row of storefronts, a pained look on their faces that said life was an equation they just couldn’t quite get to add up.

Once a month or so, Gabriel would give me the high sign and I’d join him at his desk and we’d watch the delivery of a big flat box filled with little white mice, which were presumably going to be meals for the huge snakes they kept at the pet shop next door. Watching the crowd of twitchy mice carried unceremoniously through the parking lot, blissfully ignorant to their fate, Gabe and I always stopped our own bustling activities and watched, a small salute to the sniffling mice for their honorable sacrifice to the food chain – at least as practiced in pet shops specializing in exotic reptiles.

The monthly ritual of our dead mice walking also served to temper our hubris. While we were trying to convince ourselves that we were the best things to hit journalism since Edward R. Murrow, the mice were our regular reminder of our place in the world – while we were combing Queens to find foodstuffs for our growing newspaper, the next storefront over was just as busy filling their niche of commerce, turning pink-eyed puffballs into endless lines of snake pooh.