Hello from the lighting designer of the Queens Plaza project, and thank you to Sandro for mentioning our participation. Light Projects joined in the project later than most of the design team. I wanted to underscore the persistence and hard work that the WRT and MPA have put into this complex project – not only is the area itself fraught with every kind of difficulty imaginable, but the number of city/state agencies to coordinate for approvals was a major job in itself.

I am very excited, even with the many compromises that we had to make, to see this project break ground. Which it did on August 3rd – here is my blog entry to mark that day.

http://lenischwendinger.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/queens-plaza-new-york-city-groundbreaking-august-3rd-2009/

I don’t mean to squelch your dreams, but a little more humility, please. There have been workers in this field for longer than you seem to realize.

The Queensboro Plaza station–shared between the 7 Train (IRT Flushing Line) and N and W Trains (BMT Astoria Line–is a two level elevated station, whose upper level serves Queens-bound trains, and lower level serves Manhattan-bound trains.

The Queens Plaza subway station, serving the E, R, V, and G trains(IND Queens Boulevard Line), is underground, at JFK Commuter Triangle, at the intersection of Queens Plaza, Queens Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, and Northern Boulevard.

Queens Plaza North and Queens Plaza South are the names of the roadway running east-west. Queens Plaza South is beneath the elevated (NW7) trains.

As noted on the website http://www.forgotten-ny.com, “… Queens Plaza: the gateway to Queens, [is] the first thing many motorists see when arriving via the Queensboro Bridge (known by Manhattanites as the 59th Street Bridge), and the first stop on the BMT from Manhattan….”

Please be historically correct if you are going to use our tax money to transform our birthplace into your image of what you think it should be. At the very least you should respect the neighborhood’s native and long term residents. At the very least. But this is asking a bit too much I’m afraid these days.

Nothing of this design will alleviate traffic, in fact, it will cause more traffic due to bottle-necking. Rerouting of trucks alone will congest this area even more and cause more air pollution from idling engines.

It’s all fine and dandy to propose tall trees and acoustical baffles, but in reality, almost every tree has been cut down to make way for luxury condos and more concrete that are sitting mostly unrented now due to the very thinking that is bringing more job loss to New York City. Greed. Tall trees take 50 to 100 or so years to grow, not 2. Luxury condos are unsustainable and wasteful in a depressed world economy that will be upon us for the next generation. Face it. Others have. You must as well.

This is a historically commercial area and now most of this commerce has been driven out and torn down. Even the iconic bank with clock tower is gone which could have been easily transformed into something viable by using a little foresight. Like an area for middle class jobs, but even Met Life is now gone from the area, taking over 26 million in tax breaks that the Giuliani administration handed over to them to come here in the first place with them. Now the same things have been done for billionaire luxury condo developers that have no prospects for filling their buildings with people. What a dismal waste of resources and tax money. The middle class homeowner is left holding the check by having our taxes go up to pay for this corruption and nonsense.

Forty years ago this was a bustling, viable commercial area with it’s local residents supporting this commerce on a daily basis, now it is a wasteland due to handing over our land to the rich who have no connection to our area and have thus destroyed it by remaking it into THEIR image and THEIR image ALONE with no input and respect for people who are from here. This is a process of narrow thinking and lobbying has to be stopped and NOT encouraged to take over what little is left of Queens County.

The bulldozing of Dutch Kills has infuriated it’s native residents, Queens West has turned a quiet Italian-American community into a wall of uber rich overlooking a community that has no voice at all into what goes on in their midst and Astoria is now the land of 20 story concrete block housing crowding out our historically quiet and family-oriented enclave causing massive flooding to our 2 family homes due to the lack of natural drainage of lost front, side and backyards.

Your proposals are fantasies that ultimately destroy the fabric of New York City. We should be looking to the vision of European cities such as Berlin and Rome and Stockholm where progress takes into account the historically correct notions of how those cities have been planned and are careful not to destroy the environment by wisely capping overdevelopment, which has been sorely lacking in New York for the last 8 years due to the severe lack of foresight of the Bloomberg administration.

I’m all for progress if it is viable and ultimately sustainable. New York City is no longer viable OR sustainable in the least.

you have 4 lanes and a 5 lane from 28th st merging into 2 it is obvious the people that designed this don’t drive

plus trucks cant use the upper deck so where are they to go?

This is fantasy land…and a bamboozle of taxpayers money

PS busses are going to make a sharp left turn to get on the bridge?