Clips
BATTLE IN SOUTHERN QUEENS; Grounding growth at airport; Community leaders say development around Kennedy is damaging residents and the environment
August 17, 2004 Tuesday
CITY EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A24
BY LORETTA CHAO. STAFF WRITER
Most Queens drivers know what lies at the southern end of the Van Wyck Expressway: New York's largest airport, and lots and lots of traffic.
Commuters have come to terms with their rush-hour fates, but residents of Springfield Gardens said traffic is just one of several ongoing problems related to Kennedy Airport and the industrialization of their neighborhood.
"Communities that live within five miles of airports are subject to respiratory conditions, cancer and so forth," said Barbara Brown, president of the Springfield-Rosedale Civic Association.
Brown and other community leaders are diligently opposing projects that they said damage their community, and they are asking that resources be used instead to monitor the air quality in Springfield Gardens.
A June report from the federal Environmental Protection Agency listed Kennedy Airport as one of 20 facilities that put Queens in first place among the five boroughs for harmful emissions in the air in 2002. With 209,928 pounds of toxic chemicals released that year, Queens clocked in at nearly a third more than Brooklyn, which came in second at 132,983 pounds, and seven times the emissions recorded in Manhattan, which came in third.
Kennedy is one of the busiest airports in the nation and, in 46 years, it has grown into a nine-terminal, 5,000-plus acre giant. The facility serves millions of passengers each year and is one of the country's top air cargo hubs.
Projects such as the expansion of Kennedy's air cargo center in 2001 often produce dust particles, and a number of cancer-causing chemicals have slowly filled the area's open space and park land, according to community leaders and local residents, who are struggling to keep what is left.
Saving open space
Richard Hallenbrecht, chairman of Community Board 13, said all that separates the Springfield Gardens community from the airport's "obnoxious activity" is the open space bound by Rockaway Boulevard, Eastern Road and North Boundary Road.
"My preference would be to put up a fence to create some parking areas, to control the space more, and provide access to what limited waterfront there is," Hallenbrecht said. "It would really be nice to have something attractive to look at."
Tom McKnight, a project manager for the city's Economic Development Corporation, said at a July town hall meeting that some of the proposed projects would do more good than harm. Logan Bus Co., for example, transports disabled children throughout the city and applied to build an office and a parking facility in one of the empty lots.
McKnight said a preliminary air quality analysis showed the project wouldn't effect the community. Derek Warmington, a local resident, argued, however, that bus lines, delivery services's large trucks and industrial operations in the surrounding area may combine to create an environmental disaster.
"We don't want to look at one leaf, we want to look at all of the trees that are shedding their leaves into the river," Warmington said, comparing his community to an overburdened river.
In addition, David Diaz-Sanchez, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said studies show that people living closer to vehicle fumes are more susceptible to asthma than people living far away.
More monitoring sought
Diaz-Sanchez said studies need to be more specific in order to provide concrete information about the health hazards in a given area.
"What really needs to be done is [for] experts ... to go there and monitor the local conditions," he said. "What is it that these people are being exposed to, and whether these constitute a real health risk or not."
Brown agreed that an air quality monitoring center for southeast Queens would do the trick, but the closest facility is miles away in Flushing.
"It's our contention that the concentration of emissions is very different in this area from other parts of Queens," Brown said. "But you're not going to know that unless you are actually measuring the air quality in this vicinity."
Besides fighting to use the open space as healthy, green parkland, community leaders also demand answers to a burning question: Is Springfield Gardens being targeted for hazardous projects because it is largely populated by people of color?
"We think that it's because it's a largely minority community and the powers that be feel that it's easy to put things here," Brown said. "Why is this part of Queens bearing the burden of a large percentage of the city?"
Some of the projects proposed for space near the airport promise to deliver jobs to residents. Supporters of the projects also said measures would be taken to minimize the impact on the environment.
In response, Brown said, "Do not tell me any community should exchange health for jobs ... If we already suffocate, to tell me that it's not going to get any worse doesn't help me."
GRAPHIC: Newsday Photo / Julia Gaines - Vendors do business in a lot at the southeast corner of Guy Brewer and Rockaway boulevards; the lot is one of the areas local civic associations want to keep as open space to divide their neighborhoods from Kennedy Airport.