“All I ask is for civility. When you speak to people, be civil.”
That’s how Council Member Vickie Paladino (R-Whitestone) ended her introduction at last Thursday's Department of Transportation workshop convened to solicit community feedback on possible improvements to the Queens Waterfront Greenway. “There’s no reason for anybody to jump out of their chairs and get excited,” she continued. “So please, be courteous and kind to whoever you’re speaking to tonight.”
But, minutes later, she was the one standing on a chair, shouting that opponents of the greenway should pick up and leave because their opinions would allegedly not be counted. And then a fight nearly broke out as they stormed out.
“This is not the way it was supposed to go, this was supposed to be a public hearing,” Paladino yelled into the microphone as DOT staff watched her take control of the event — and an incorrect narrative around it.
The event at Alley Pond Environmental Center, in the far northeast Queens neighborhood of Douglaston, was not a public hearing, where constituents take turns speaking to a panel of officials, nor was it ever billed as such, even at the event itself:
Except by Paladino. For whatever reason — and bike lane supporters strongly believe it was to create disinformation that she could later use for political purposes — the MAGA Council member continually took to social media to tell constituents that they would have an opportunity to testify, as if at a community board meeting. Paladino’s Facebook page featured two call-outs ahead of the event: A video posted on Oct. 7 and a graphic posted on Wednesday that both described it as a “public hearing.”
But DOT was consistent: “These workshops will offer a platform for you to discuss existing conditions, share your experiences, and help us identify key issues and opportunities for improvement,” the agency's sign-up form read.
By crafting this bait-and-switch, Paladino was able to rile her supporters into believing that they were being silenced.
“I want everybody who is not interested in this — because it’s not a public hearing, because it’s divide and conquer — to leave now,” Paladino ended her rallying cry. As the group swarmed towards the exit, DOT staff attempted to calm the group down — but not before Eric Forte, Paladino’s budget director and office manager, nearly got in an altercation with an attendee. DOT’s Vince Barone, in the teal shirt, had to physically hold Forte back from the man.
After leaving, Paladino recorded a video on the front steps of Alley Pond Environmental Center, where she gave her take on the event.
“DOT did this meeting all wrong tonight," she said. "It should have been everybody here, or a certain number of people, should have been given at least two minutes at a mic to express their feelings, either pro or con.”
Paladino’s video was quote-tweeted by DOT Chief Communications Officer Nick Benson, pushing back on the insinuation that she was unaware of the meeting’s intended format.
Paladino doubled down on her claim in a Twitter thread she posted on Friday afternoon. "Keep in mind, there was there was zero effort made to even inform the community about this meeting — nobody locally would even know this was happening unless MY OFFICE informed them."
Locals who spoke to Streetsblog at Thursday's event refuted this claim, saying that they received a mailer advertising it.
Plus, this was the third meeting hosted by the DOT about the greenway project using the workshop format: The first two were held earlier this month in Astoria and Flushing, with little fanfare. A fourth, virtual, workshop will be held on Zoom next week.
“We successfully captured a wide variety of feedback at our third workshop in Douglaston and we will always strive to ensure we’re hosting respectful, inclusive meetings as we develop this historic greenway expansion hand-in-hand with local residents,” Barone said in an emailed statement to Streetsblog.
Alley Pond Environmental Center, the location of Thursday’s contentious meeting, sits on the chaotic Northern Boulevard, and is so far east in Queens that it’s cut off of DOT’s own map of the project. The center is located between the Bayside and Douglaston LIRR stops on the Port Washington line, and is more directly served by the Q12 bus and a semi-protected, two-way bike facility. The subway doesn’t even reach this far into the borough.
Getting from the LIRR to the center isn’t ideal: You have to walk along the busy, multi-lane Northern Boulevard where drivers are merging on and off of the Cross Island Parkway. To fill the gap, Queens Bike Share offered a free cargo bike shuttle that Streetsblog used to get from the LIRR to the center, enjoying a bumpy ride along a route that has seen 51 crashes since the bike lane was installed, the vast majority of which involved motorists.
The bike racks outside the center were full when the workshop began at 6 p.m., but Paladino claimed that “bike lanes are not presently being used here.” She added on a flier that “bicycles are not a method of commuting for actual adults in this area,” in an attempt to broadly paint community members who don’t drive as outside agitators.
Paladino has previously voiced her concern — including in an op-ed published on Streetsblog — about the proliferation of unregistered vehicles and ghost plates in New York City. However, she appears less concerned when it happens in her own driveway, as Streetsblog reported in 2023.
At Thursday's meeting, the Council Member's son and staffer, Thomas Paladino Jr., who owns the once fraudulently registered Aston Martin, refused to identify himself to this reporter after he initiated conversation seeing the reporter's "Streetsblog" name card. Instead, he made an obscene gesture.
According to the Queens Daily Eagle, Paladino Jr. also told event attendee and community member Jaslin Kaur, "Fuck off," insinuated she didn’t live in the area and called her a "piece of shit."
The MAGA crowd
Local opposition to the greenway project has taken a few forms, including paranoia about financial kickbacks and the "15-minute city" conspiracy theory (which was repeated by Paladino on Facebook) — but it mainly focused on the possibility of losing free street parking, and the horrifying thought that without a car as a barrier-to-entry, District 19 could be accessed more easily "by outsiders."
Parts of the Queens Waterfront Greenway already exist, but getting from one end to the other can be like a game of Frogger: Segments are scattered around the borough, and traversing the spaces between them can be dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists alike.
“This greenway plan could better connect residents in Northeast Queens to the beautiful parks in their neighborhoods through new bike paths and pedestrian spaces,” DOT told Streetsblog in a statement, “creating welcoming areas for cyclists as well as families in need of safer streets to walk with their children and grandchildren.”
But connecting these areas is exactly what opponents don’t want to happen.
“Herein lies the biggest concern,” said Paladino. “Taking one neighborhood and intersecting it with another neighborhood. It makes up what I consider kind of like a runway. If anybody's committing crimes — that's a big concern of mine — they can hop on [the bike lane].”
(Paladino must certainly be aware that there is a rather long car-free bike path — the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway — in Eastern Queens, and there have been no reports of it being used as an escape route for fleeing robbers. Indeed, the very term "getaway car" suggests that the existing roadways provide ample pathways for criminals.)
Some residents of the area complained that cyclists are the outsiders.
“You can’t all of a sudden change neighborhoods because somebody has a bike and they want to ride one," said one person. "We bought this house because it’s a ‘two-fare zone’ [an archaic term that dates back before 1997 when there were no free transfers from subways and buses]. Now they’re going to turn it into a crap zone: Scooters, bikes, forget it. And then we won’t be able to park our cars.”
Many greenway supporters are also longtime residents of the area. Two older women with the A Better College Point Civic Association said the project would successfully reclaim public waterfront paths that they say have been blocked off by private condo buildings.
“They’ve gated it off. We’ve been fighting for years to have that access opened up,” said Sheryl Kleven, a founding member of the group.
Jazz, a younger, lifelong resident of Bayside, is a bike commuter who works near Queens College, and recently sold her car. She’s been riding bikes in Queens her whole life, and reminisced about going on rides with her dad and brother as a kid.
“My mom was more scared to ride a bike [in the area], so she would load our bikes in the car and drive us to the park. I think it messed with my perception of how close that park actually is.”
Another District 19 resident echoed Jazz’s statement.
“It says a lot that I hear people commenting, ‘Look, if you want to go to the park, put your bike on the rack and drive to the park.’ I have to buy a car to access the park?”
At the end of the workshop, a smaller group of people who stayed behind after Paladino's mass exodus gathered around one of the maps, focused on Fort Totten Park.
“There’s not enough open space in Queens, in general,” one man said.
“That’s probably why everybody goes here,” a woman responded, pointing to the park on the map, a small nub of green that juts out into the Long Island Sound and is accessible via the Joe Michaels Mile — a portion of the greenway that already exists.
The man agreed. “It might be because there’s a multi-use path. Maybe that’s why people go.”
