Our Woodside and Sunnyside neighborhoods in New York City are developed and congested to their limits. Yet a large real estate corporation is looking to build a massive apartment building on a site that is not even zoned to allow residential use!

The Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance describes the threat:

“Phipps Houses, once a model landlord and neighbor, has shocked our close community with its desire for a major zoning change and a 10 story apartment building on Barnett Avenue, pressed up against two blocks of busy railroad tracks. The site is zoned for manufacturing, not for residential use, and for decades it's been a much needed parking lot for 225 to 250 neighbors, including the 472 apartments in Phipps Garden Apartments, where the Phipps corporation never provided parking. The proposed new building would tower at least twice the height of the tallest adjacent buildings, and bring more crowding and congestion of every kind, including increased traffic and parking woes, threats to safety and quiet.”

We don’t have the infrastructure to support the new tenants moving into this building. Our public transportation is poor, with the #7 subway the most crowded in the entire system. Our local schools are already overcrowded, and there is not a Middle School. Local parking is now a dramatic problem, yet the new building would eliminate several hundred parking spaces for both private cars and commercial vehicles. Traffic on many residential streets is already a grave danger that would be seriously exacerbated.

The problems go on. Read more in the Sunnyside Post news story and from the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance.  Our neighbors have compiled an itemized page of reasons for objecting to a new building that you can read and print as a PDF. 

Please help us prevent the construction of this enormous and invasive building and keep Woodside and Sunnyside the amazing neighborhood that we love. Tell City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer and Queens Community Board 2 that you oppose this building!