Friday, March 30, 2018
Vol. 94, No.27
FOUNDED 1923
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LOCALLY OWNED AND EDITED
Wells well PAGE 8 n Church schedules
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Village begins hearings on new apartment complex
THE SEASON BEGINS
BY RIKKI N. MASSAND
The GCHS Girls Lacrosse team started its season this week with a win against Port Washington and a loss against Syosset. Above, Junior Caitlin Cook. See pags 72-73
Lot 7N parking situation a standstill BY RIKKI N. MASSAND
Residents of Hilton Hall Apartments (67 Hilton Avenue) who approached the Central Property Owners’ Association last fall about the proliferation of LIRR commuters parking in Village Parking Field 7N all day, leaving no spaces for them to park near their residences, will have to wait at least 60 days until the next meeting of the Garden City Traffic Commission to find any proposed solutions for their conundrum. At the Commission’s March 22nd meeting, village officials’ request for a parking study of Lot 7N was not complete and the Commission turned to the CPOA for guidance about changing signage in the lot to discourage LIRR commuter parking, with hours of parking enforcement serving as a deterrent to cars parked for the standard workday. At the January 11 Traffic Commission meeting, the last bimonthly traffic
meeting prior to last Thursday night, the police department made a suggestion of changing Lot 7N’s signage to ‘6AM through 6PM’ instead of the current ‘8AM through 6PM’ In January the Commission deferred the item because the village’s downtown Streetscape study was still being conducted and BFJ Planning, the Manhattan-based consulting firm contracted with the village last October on the request of the Planning Commission, had yet to evaluate Lot 7N as part of its scope of work. At the March 22 meeting Pat DiMattia, CPOA liaison to the Traffic Commission, spoke about the difficult situation while a handful of Hilton Hall residents sat in the front rows of the meeting room at Village Hall to listen to the discussion. The Commission’s agenda referenced a letter from Arlene Chianese, Suzanne Dowling and Felicia Lovaglio, all from Hilton Hall, “with regards to numerous requests withSee page 47
The Village Board of Trustees’ public hearings on the 555 Stewart Avenue apartment complex and related zoning change brought out crowd of 25 Garden City residents plus a dozen activists from neighboring villages, many wearing the bright orange New York Communities for Change t-shirts. The group was one of the co-plaintiffs in a federal housing discrimination lawsuit that the Village of Garden City lost in 2014. (Another plaintiff in the suit was the New York Acorn Housing Company, which later was known as MHANY Management.) The discussion at the hearing went far beyond the zoning and building application for the vacant 4.5-acre property adjacent to the Roosevelt Field south entrance, which includes 150 apartments of which 15 will be affordable housing units. The New York Communities for Change group commented on racial segregation and the alleged resistance to minorities living in Garden City. Some said they are thankful the building plan involves a 10% affordable housing mandate, others were frustrated it has taken Garden City many years to reach this stage. Mary Crosson, a homeowner in Hempstead village said, “It has been almost ten years that we’ve been fighting this fight, so I wanted to thank the Garden City Board of Trustees. I am thankful we got to this point. It has been a long, hard road, from ACORN litigation to the New York Communities for Change. I am thankful for the fact that affordable housing will be in Garden City. I feel overjoyed -- my grandchildren are going to college and working very hard. I will tell them that they will be able to afford and choose to live everywhere they would want to live. For that I feel honored,” she said. Lucas Sanchez, the Long Island director for New York Communities for Change, spoke at the March 22nd hearing and said there is great context for the ACORN litigation against the Village of Garden City, going back 15 years in courts and with race inequality, decades prior to that. “It has been a fight against segregation in the Village of Garden City and segregation across Long Island. Long Island continues to be the single most segregated suburban tract in the United States. It has been 15 years fighting segregation here. We live in a time when people are smart enough not to say ‘I don’t want to live next to a black person or live next to a Hispanic person.’ These days people say things like ‘I am just concerned about taxes’ or concerned about traffic and concerned about the quality of the village I moved to, and to us (NYCC) the people wearing orange shirts, this village had to have a court-appointed monitor to make sure the village and residents here do the right thing for once. I want everyone here to look around at the white faces in the room, you are all wealthy enough to forget about your tax concerns and See page 47
Traffic Comm approves stop signs for two intersections PAGE 6 Vinyl Revolution record show at St. Paul's April 8 PAGE 14