Take Your Head Out Of The Semi-Toxic Sludge!

Queens boosters make it sound like such a great place to be:

Ditmars Boulevard in East Elmhurst used to be the last street before the beach. Now there’s a highway and then an airport, both built on landfill, and the beach of the 1920s has long since been replaced by a semi-toxic marsh.

“I’ve been living in this neighborhood since 1960,” recalled Borough President Helen Marshall, “and air quality has always been a problem. It’s not just the airport. It’s the combination of everything.”

By “everything” Marshall means LaGuardia Airport, the Grand Central Parkway, the combined sewage overflows (CSOs) into Flushing Bay, and the finger sticking out from the airport which prevents the raw sewage from those same CSOs from circulating fully into Long Island Sound. Instead the sludgy stench is trapped in northern Queens, and much of it ends up collecting under the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge near Shea Stadium.

“The waters here are very dirty and stagnant,” complained Ranford Parkes, who has lived next door to Marshall since she first moved to the neighborhood 45 years ago.

“Sometimes you have to go back into the house,” admitted his wife, Easter, “because the smell is so bad. I don’t know if it’s the chemicals or the river.”
Marshall concurred with this assessment, saying, “Some days I open my back door and smell chemicals.”

“Jet fuel?” immediately suggested Jackson Heights State Senator John Sabini. The occasion which brought these two Queens pols together was an announcement, on the 27th Avenue pedestrian bridge over the Grand Central Parkway, of a bill co-sponsored by Sabini but inspired by Marshall.

“We have strong bipartisan support for this bill,” promised Sabini, “which says to the DEC, ‘Take your head out of the sand.'”

The bill calls for the state Department of Environmental Conservation to test pollution hotspots along the borough’s waterfront:

Right now the DEC tests air quality at 80 sites throughout the state, but the Queens sites are all located within the interior of the borough, not near the waterfront airports. “Every plane that takes off here,” grimaced Sabini, as several of them passed by directly behind him, “has the equivalent particulate emission of 3,000 cars.”

Of course, moving the test sites will only confirm the problem, but Sabini and Marshall are confident solutions will eventually emerge. Neither was willing to talk about specific solutions. Marshall did say this, however: “I’m not worried, because the minds of Americans will come up with something. Science, they’re doing it all time.”

“We don’t’ know just how bad the problem is yet,” she went on to admit, “but we have to first know what we’re talking about.”

Marshall then referred to the waterfront corridor from LIC — which has the greatest concentration of power plants in the state — to Bayside as “asthma alley.”
“It’s no accident,” concurred Sabini, “that asthma rates are so high around here.”

Asthma Alley, airplane particulates, stagnant toxic sludge . . . with any luck, rents will go down. And what a great place to build a new urban community!