Gioia Calls For Greater Use Of LIC Resources
BY THOMAS COGAN

land City, the inquirer being Craig Axelrod, with a Long Island construction

Those at the January breakfast meeting of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation at Silvercup Studios last Tuesday heard City Councilmember Eric Gioia talk about urban conditions that, if properly exploited, can lead to civic improvement. He said he finds those conditions in Long Island City, a part of his 26th District, and foresees a great and necessary transformation of the area, a transformation that has manifestly begun.

Long Island City and adjacent territory contain three resources, natural and industrial, that can lead the way to great development, Gioia said: broad, underutilized boulevards, a waterfront and a rail yard. There are great possibilities for taking the several automobile sales and service lots that have gone vacant on Queens and Northern Boulevards and developing them for both new businesses and residences. The Sunnyside Yard is bound to be a crucial part of improved rail service between Long Island and Manhattan, and the banks of Newtown Creek and the East River should eventually constitute a greenway 16 miles in length under current plans or, as Gioia suggested, even longer if it goes south of the creek and along the Brooklyn shoreline. When we think about what kind of city we want, the councilmember said, we're likely to conclude that it should be a place where the middle class can thrive and schools survive. Good schools keep the middle class in place and not on the run to the suburbs.

City Councilmember Eric Gioia outlined his vision for the Queens waterfront and the future of development in Long Island City to the Long Island City Business Development Corporation last Tuesday, January 23.

Not everyone will move into the middle class via home ownership and the like, but Gioia praised attempts at civic and social betterment and further praised those that help others to improve. He lauded the Reverend Mitchell Taylor of the East River Development Alliance, for his work in the Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing development in the country, citing the particular example of a working woman living there. She believed herself in a hopeless financial rut, despite her steady income. Taylor helped her with her tax forms, getting her a large return and helping her raise her credit score. Eventually she was able to finance a home of her own, demonstrating social mobility.

His first questioner was concerned about arts and culture. Gioia said he was on the boards of PS1 and the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and aware of the need to keep the arts on the move in Long Island City and the wider area. He declared himself enthusiastic (or 95 percent of the time, anyway) about the ideas of Richard Florida, the social philosopher currently teaching at George Mason University in Virginia. Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and its sequel, The Flight of the Creative Class, says that an unencumbered mix of intellectual, creative and economic elements (known by the acronym ICE) will yield a dynamic and prosperous social atmosphere. Long Island City, Gioia believes, has been demonstrating this. He said that when the City Council granted money for a more climate-controlled PS 1, the museum on Jackson Avenue, affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art and dedicated to emergent arts and artists, it was money wisely invested.

The next question was from someone concerned about waterfront damage. Gioia said that a few days hence he would head a demonstration of protest beside Newtown Creek, deploring the immense oil spill from half a century ago that is still seeping from the ground in Greenpoint into the creek, and for which Exxon Mobil continues to refuse responsibility for cleanup. He said he has brought a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, which he described as spending untold millions on defense lawyers that could better be spent repairing the damage. He added that the city is a signatory of the Kyoto mandates about global warming and is generally running ahead of the U.S. in reducing carbon emissions and establishing sustainability. When asked about public transport, Gioia said that the wealthy Mayor Michael Bloomberg takes the subway to work as a political gesture, while he takes it just to get to work. In the year just past, he found the frequent weekend shutdowns of the No.7 line, ostensibly for repairs, a great annoyance, not at all abated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's assurance that such shutdowns never went on when the Mets were in town. He envisioned that, in addition to the subway and elevated lines coming through it, Long Island City should include transport currently missing, such as ferry service.

The councilmember was asked how he would improve school quality in Long company, Emmy Building. Though Axelrod lives on Long Island, not in the city, he equated solid housing, which he believes Emmy represents (its structures, on Purvis and Jackson Streets, and the projected one on Queens Plaza South, will produce as many as 200 housing units), with the opportunity for high-quality schooling. Gioia said he would demand further school construction in the area, including a charter school. Going from there to the matter of youth development, Gioia said he started a baseball league in a park under the Queensboro Bridge and was able to correlate its progress with a local decline in quality-of-life crimes. He then exhorted everyone to make some contribution to local improvement, from voluntary participation such as coaching athletic teams to simply financing them and other organizations by writing a check.

Gioia concluded that, after five years on the City Council, "I think I'm making a tremendous difference- with your help." He is due to go out of office by 2010. He could not say what his post-Council career would entail, though some other elective office could surely be considered among alternatives. For the present, he epitomized the quest for livability in his district, comprising Woodside, Sunnyside, Astoria, Long Island City and a segment of Maspeth, by declaring: "This is where we want to live and this is what we'll do to make it so."