Prometheus 6

Southeast Queens Is Split Over Makeover Proposal
By ELLEN BARRY

When Gloria Black looks into Jamaica’s future, she sees a grand restoration: Department stores will move into spaces where discount jewelers sell removable gold teeth; vacant storefronts, their windows taped up with yellowing newspaper, will fill one by one. The prosperous downtown of the 1960s — the one that drew families from Harlem and Brooklyn and South Carolina — will return to southeast Queens.

Crystal Ervin sees something different. If Jamaica is reshaped by the city’s rezoning, she fears, the single-family home her parents bought in 1953 will be jammed up against a six-story building. Parking, already a headache, will become a nightmare. And the modest middle-class dream of her mother, who is now 85, will be taken away.

These were just two responses to Wednesday’s news that a 368-block rezoning plan had been approved by the City Council’s Land Use Committee, making final approval a near certainty. The plan would allow hotels and office towers in the center of Jamaica, add a corridor of six-story buildings to Hillside Avenue, and cap development in some residential areas. Though most residents are still hazy about how the plan would affect them, community activists have split over one central question: Can density bring good things to a neighborhood?

The question is particularly pointed around Jamaica’s shopping district, which was once the city’s fourth-largest retail area. That all changed in the 1970s and ’80s, when shoppers began to head out to malls on Long Island and Jamaica’s anchor stores vanished one by one, leaving discount stores and nail salons in their place. Surrounding the downtown area are sleepy, low-slung commercial strips and neighborhoods that treasure their quiet.

“This is almost like the beginning of suburbia,” said Gregory Comodore, 53, who owns Byrnes Hardware and Tool Rentals on Jamaica Avenue. Over the last 32 years, he said, his business has catered to Italian and German immigrants, then black and Hispanic families, then West Indian immigrants — but they all had this in common: they were homeowners.

He said he worries rezoning will bring “walls and walls of apartment houses.”

“What are we going to sell them?” Mr. Comodore said. “A couple light bulbs?”

But the same notion delighted Tommy Giannopoulos, who owns Michael’s Flower Shoppe on Hillside Avenue. He dismissed his neighbor’s concerns about parking congestion — “We live in New York City! There’s a parking problem everywhere” — and focused on the abandoned businesses across the street, where he said a strip mall had been shuttered for 10 years.