By Matthew Russell Lee
NEW YORK CITY, January 27 -- With a snow day declared in NYC on Thursday, the plowing performance of Michael Bloomberg's administration was put to the test.
In late December streets went unplowed for days. Many said that Sanitation Department managers ordered a slow down to protest job cuts and demotions.
While Thursday found that most streets were better plowed, some were not. In The Bronx, bus service was entirely suspended. Queens' 40th Avenue, for example, remained covered in a foot of snow.
When Inner City Press inquired, the Sanitation Department blamed it on a taxi company parking its vehicles in the street and said they could be towed.
A Sanitation Department worker confided that the protest of Bloomberg's job cuts had been refusing to write any summons for the month of December, denying the City revenue. “It was a Christmas present,” he said.
The taxi company on 40th Avenue is in a section of Long Island City sometimes called Dutch Kills. It was re-zoned to allow for the construction of a number of seemingly out of place hotels.
Inner City Press checked out the Holiday Inn on 39th Avenue and found it virtually empty. Still, no one but guests is allowed to use the pool. Chunks of ice fell off the building into the largely empty parking lot.
On the other side of 40th Avenue are the two large holes dug by the MTA to extend the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Station. Some work proceeded despite the declared snow day.
On the other side, a scrap metal company from Pennsylvania had a truck full of large pipes, behind the old Pam-Am Building, now a Department of Education facility mostly empty for the day.
It was to the Astoria section of Long Island City that Bloomberg came after the small intervening snow storm, to nosh on lemony Greek soup in a Ditmars deli with Peter Vallone.
40th Ave in LIC, afternoon of Jan 27, plowing not shown, (c)MRLee
While that end of Long Island City was quickly plowed this time, 40th Avenue remains unplowed as well as misplanned. It is urban archeology that may explain it - and even provide some solution.
Forward looking footnotes: the location of the old Queensboro Arena, venue of boxing announced by Harry Balogh, remains in the haze of Dutch Kills' history. There are numerous dormant construction site in the area now, of builders who threw down foundations to purportedly get grandfathered into the rights to build more hotels to sit empty. We'll see.
