Donovan Richards

Scenes Of Queens: Emergency At The Umbrella Hotel

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This scene happened in Kew Gardens. 

This is the Umbrella Hotel, where the first homicide of departing mayor and lying lowlife Bill de Blasio last year in office took place, after a fight broke out from a hotel room where another raucous party was being held and spilled outside  in front of the building’s entrance and three men got shot during a rumble between two groups of men, one of them fatally.

The 19-year-old killer was actually already in custody for another homicide in Queens when he shot a man to death at a karaoke bar in Flushing over a fight about a gold chain the victim was wearing.

The Umbrella Hotel is actually a mixed use building featuring once touted luxury residences on the higher floors. But the hotel itself had persistent trouble filling vacancies, so the management decided to let a homeless service provider fill the rooms with homeless people, which the city would pay around $2,000 to $3,000 a month to shelter them.

When the pandemic hit, the Umbrella became a convenient site for the city to use to fill their empty rooms with even more homeless people so they can socially distance and shelter in place from the public. But for some reason and against the CDC’s  pandemic guidelines, the hotel management still allowed parties and events to fill up the rest the rooms so they can cover losses accrued from slow business induced by COVID-19, but that all ceased because of the cold blooded murder and the Umbrella got closed for good.

 

Which is why this was such an odd sight nearly one year later. Which I eye-witnessed after viewing a Christmas tree lighting at Queens Borough Hall directly across the street from this dour block. Looks like more sordid shit is going down at the Brella.

Curiosity beckons to ask why was a NYPD patrol van standing guard, idling on the common area of egress for the remaining residents of this “luxury” building? Was there a fugitive they trapped in there? Couldn’t be because the freight entrance was opened. Closer inspection found that this  exhibition of authority probably didn’t warrant this much excess.

Or did it?…

  Apparently, there’s going on at the Umbrella that’s really alarming the folks at the Department of Buildings. It might be gut renovation or conversions to make it 100% residential. Or 100% affordable. Or going by the extreme security measures the NYPD decided to use here, maybe the Umbrella owners are prepping this for prisoners from Rikers, making this a place for them to be contained with high security quarters while their trials are being processed a block away at Criminal Courthouse two blocks east once City Council fast tracks the premature complete shutdown of the prison island with a tower jail that will be erected in another 6 years.

If that isn’t much of a downer to read about on the day of the birth of Jesus, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards toy drive was even more dystopian, thanks to the irrational panic induced by him and Mayor de Blasio and Governor Kathy Hochul about the mild Omicron strain, he forced the children and their parents to receive their gifts in darkness instead of inside Borough Hall, as they appeared to check every boy and girls vax status with their celly flashlights.

The vaccine mandate has made it easier to separate the nice from the naughty

Our leaders and officials may be blockheads, but at least they picked a nice tree.

Merry Christmas from Impunity City.

Your city.          

Housing Inequity, Death And Tax Breaks: A Tale Of Two Queens Areas

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Astoria Houses

Thanksgiving, the symbolic holiday where all beings partake in communal gratitude and partake in sharing of the bountiful harvest of food and shelter. But on the east and west sides of Queens, it’s a theory that’s as good as dead.

An apartment building at The Astoria Houses are currently without gas and tenants have been without heat and hot water for a month. Despite the typical dragging of responsive service from NYCHA management to restore their utility they pay rent for, elected officials have been comparably unresponsive. This craven indifference continued until it got the attention of PIX News and a visit from streaming independent news channel Status Coup when a charity group were serving trays of hot food on catering tables at the front entrance at the building with the gas outage.

Then a few days later, a non-profit organization Queens Together arrived tagged along by elected officials arrived to bring some charity of their own. District City Councilman Costa Costantidas, House Representative Carolyn Maloney and newly elected Queens Borough President Donovan Richards arrived with bags of food, PPE’s and 48 crockpots for all the tenants deprived of gas services from the city’s biggest slumlord NYCHA, who supplied their vulnerable residents with single burner hot plates for sustenance.

While crockpots are an improvement over the cheap ass hot plates the tenants it still an immensely poor substitute for action that’s expected from elected officials.Because after their cameo appearances the gas still remained shut down. That three of them showed up so late to aid their constituents in need and come by with crockpots to do a photo op instead of demanding accountability from NYCHA only validated how insignificant their presence was despite their status as lawmakers.

And these lawmakers were just as invisible when it came to the city’s policy for new development that still goes wanting by hundreds of thousands of residents; because a mere 5 blocks north from the Astoria Houses, de Blasio’s NYC Housing program is debuting and opened the lottery for their latest “affordable housing” building with one and two bedrooms with rents ranging from $2,050 to $2,500, all set up for a lucky person or couple earning between 70 and 130 large.

But the luckiest person or LLC who/that developed this tower got a nice 421-a tax exemption from the city for being philanthropic enough to set aside 20-30% of these apartments from this lux building for higher income earning housing starved folks. Who knows how much of the city’s largess went to this developer that could have went to a get a new boiler sooner at Astoria Houses. I bet it would have bought a lot of crockpots.

Even though those donated crockpots look nice, what are people going to do if the power goes out? Or if those crockpots are defective? The only thing Costa, Carolyn and Donnie and that foodie non-profit contributed besides marginal aid for the 48 tenants still without gas utilities were nice optics for themselves.(While Rep. Crowley above quipped that a “single-burner hotplate is simply not a solution”, a crockpot is barely an improvement either. The most they can do with them is be able to boil water faster to bathe and wash dishes with. It’s just another remnant of neoliberal based civic policies that are starving essential services for the vulnerable.

Meanwhile across the river in Flushing, an expansive swath of luxury hyper-development by a filthy toxic creek is being planned and vociferously lobbied and pushed by a Chinese real estate consortium, departing term limited councilman Peter Koo and tainted community board leadership who have a conflict of interest with the land grab (and will resort to violence and intimidation to get this approved) that the city is eager to fast track. It’s layout includes behemoth towers and hotels with a morsel of “affordable” apartments for the consortium to cash in on the sweet 421a break.

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Even though a few other “affordable” luxury towers have already been planted and another in it’s nascent skeletal phase, presumably the developers and the city are all champing at the bit to get this done because they are building these towers to provide equity to low income earning people in desperate need for housing even if that amount is menial. It’s also to “revive” the neighborhood even though it’s one of the highest populated neighborhoods in Queens and arguably the busiest. Naturally this hyper-development that’s being steamrolled has been met with stiff resistance and frequent protests.

But it’s a lot busier on the low end these days in Flushing thanks to COVID19. With 20% of NYC citizens unemployed since the contagion claimed over 30,000 lives and suspended and destroyed small businesses since the first lockdown began in March, lines for a food pantry run by La Journada go on for blocks and blocks. And blocks. And blocks. These people might not have gas outages at their homes, but it’s clear they have to prioritize rent over food because of their existential economic stasis to keep themselves sheltered.

As for the non-sheltered, the homeless population in Flushing as well as most of Eastern Queens continues to amass. Although the city Department Of Homeless Services policy’s past reliance on hotels to shelter people has become a necessity because of the pandemic, many homeless people still prefer to sleep rough on the sidewalks or parks and in inclement weather than to stay in hotel shelters that aren’t safe from violence or infection. Which led to this horrific sight nearby a public housing building, when a citizen found a homeless man frozen dead in a fetal position sheltered by a makeshift shelter made of cardboard boxes furnished with a pillow and blanket underneath him.

Pedro Rodriguez Facebook

Housing and food insecurity and the existential fear of being penniless and dying on the street surely shouldn’t be happening in the wealthiest country in the world and with the Dow Jones at 30,000.

It surely shouldn’t be happening at all in the greatest city in the world with a Democrat majority with alleged progressive values that were elected and appointed to government offices. As this pandemic has exposed even more regarding housing in New York City, these officials inaction has enabled these neoliberal based civic policies prioritizing the needs of a fantasized populace than the one that already exists and all their superficial actions establishes them as the posers they are, and the ramifications from them are leaving devastation, depression and death in it’s wake. The difference now is that they no longer are capable of obscuring it.

Because while Thanksgiving comes only once a year, the laws enacted by fauxgressives favoring the developer overlords assures that everyday is Black Friday for public housing residents, the working poor, the aged and the destitute of Queens and the rest of the five boroughs.