While the buzz word in The Village, for the six years at least, has been “revitalize”, it should be clear by now that the current administration has either no interest in revitalizing our village or they are incapable of revitalizing it.
If they did, they could look at the good citizens of the rest of the peninsula for ideas, and programs – things that other areas of the peninsula have undertaken, that have helped those areas stay vibrant.
Ask Ron Edelstein, or Janet Eshagoff, or Michele Tabaroki, and others, who are doing what they can, using their imagination, skills and talents to do what they can to pump life into the peninsula.
What Mayor Bral & Co. are good at is reinventing the village. They seem hell-bent on changing our suburban village into a new thing. Not urban, not suburban.
They are creating Urbanurbia. Denser, more crowded, a bedroom community with bedrooms stacked on top of each other and squeezed into every square inch of lots; allowing no room for drainage, no room for parking, no room for the cars on the road, with less space and sky, less green and less trees. More concrete and less life; replacing trees and open space with asphalt and steel.
Of course, the “traffic studies” for each project proposed claim “no adverse effect.”
In a back and forth with me at a Village Board meeting, Esquire Bloom, as counsel for the latest megaproject, denied that traffic jams on East Shore Road even exist!
If you’re reading this, good chance you’ve driven on East Shore Rd. Good chance you’ve even been stuck in a non-existing traffic jam!
No effect on class sizes, no effect on traffic accidents, no effect on the water table. Then, of course, there’s reality. We live here- we experience the flooding, the larger class sizes, the millions spent on new classes, and new teachers, for all the new students who certainly don’t live in any of the apartment houses being put up on the peninsula.
And this is before the hundred more apartments coming to Millbrook Court, and the forty apartments coming in one block South at Clover Drive. (I know this last project is in the Estates, but don’t tell me they don’t add to the overall problem of overdevelopment on the peninsula.
While the current administration says “not my problem”, because it’s on the other side of the street marking the border between the two villages, I say consider it while planning.
Sixty apartments coming to Middle Neck Road. Just North of Hicks Lane. Twenty-three apartments a block North of that, at Middle Neck Road and Gutheil Lane.
Sixty-three apartments coming to East Shore Road. Don’t let them tell you this is a “55 and over” building, and so it won’t add kids to the schools.
All that designation means is that at least 80% of the apartments have to have at least one inhabitant over 55 years old. They are being disingenuous.
How many “properties of interest” from the Mayor’s “master plan” have already been developed? How many are left? Where is the revitalization?
The village seems more divided, more contentious, more angry than ever.
This administration seems to be good at that. Developing buildings, yes.
Changing codes and zoning laws to allow taller and denser buildings that fit into what used to be considered suburbia, yes.
Getting building owners to at least hang the brown paper that hides vacant stores in straight lines, so it doesn’t look like a slum, no. Getting landlords to fill the vacant stores? Ha! Please don’t point to “the bakery” (Marie Blachere) anymore as a sign of success- one croissant does not a village make!
I grew up in Brooklyn. My family moved to the suburbs so that I could go to a better school, with less crime and more space. Now it seems as if urbanurbia has followed me to Great Neck. With the right leadership, it’s not too late. I want my Suburbia back!
Sam Yellis
Great Neck
