Going backwards in Queens
Last week, President Biden gave a speech in Milwaukee about granting $3.3 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act “to reconnect and rebuild communities in more than 40 states, including those that were divided by transportation infrastructure decades ago and have long been overlooked,” according to the White House.
Biden said he was “delivering environmental justice by reconnecting disadvantaged communities and neighborhoods to new opportunities for the future.”
Many of those projects will repair damage that expressways and the interstate did to often poor and minority areas in the 1950s and later by cutting through densely populated areas like in Atlanta, Philly and Syracuse and prioritized suburbs and cars over cities and mass transit. Yet, there is one project on the list which does exactly the opposite.
The $117,696,000 for the wrong-headed “Queensway” plan to benefit Forest Hills cuts off poor and minority areas in Queens from access to mass transit.
This is the old Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Rail Road. Built in 1880, it was deactivated in 1962, severing a vital fast link into Penn Station from the Rockaways and the areas around what would soon be called John F. Kennedy Airport.
There have been several efforts to resume service on the 3.5 mile stretch, starting in 1968, but they have been blocked by powerful political interests in neighborhoods like Forest Hills, where homeowners oppose having a train run near their property. They want the unused tracks made into a park.
What Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand should have done is send money to restore rail service (called QueensLink, which includes a walkway/bikeway on the side).
We love Forest Hills and the people who live there, but it is neither a disadvantaged nor underserved community, with its own LIRR station and many subway stops, including the super-express E train. Miles further down the old Rockaway Beach Branch, New Yorkers from Far Rockaway and Edgemere, economically distressed areas with overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic populations, have no such options and must rely on the slow A train, which takes forever to travel to Midtown.
And now Buttigieg is funding the foolish plan to build a park on the irreplaceable right of way instead of transit, killing the chance for a revived train. Doesn’t he know that he runs the Department of Transportation, not the Department of the Interior responsible for parks?
Many years ago, when he was advocating for a direct rail link from JFK to Midtown (which New York shamefully still doesn’t have) Sen. Pat Moynihan walked along the old branch as a possible option. We’ve done that walk ourselves. Buttigieg and Moynihan’s Senate successors should make the walk themselves and see that bringing back transit achieves the equity and connectedness they are promoting. Plowing under the tracks of the Rockaway Beach Branch, the only north-south rail line in Queens, is a huge mistake.
Having been among the very first to champion the High Line against City Hall’s wishes to tear it down, we know that unneeded rail lines can make a nice park, but only if unneeded. Otherwise, why not turn the 1/3 of the subway system’s 656 miles that are above ground into parks? Absurd? Yes, and so is Queensway.