1972

Union workers protest at the LeFrak City work site. .

A plan by builder Sam LeFrak to construct a housing development above the railroad yards adjacent to Willow Lake and Union Turnpike was blasted by local residents, who said the project would over-congest an already heavily populated community... The borough president and the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce expressed outrage at Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s surprise move to cut off all capital construction funds for the proposed 50-acre campus at York College, which was operating out of “temporary” facilities....

A hearing at the city’s Board of Standard & Appeals on the proposed LeFrak high-rise over the Kew Gardens railyards drew hundreds of angry residents. One opposing group was the Kew Gardens-Forest Hills Committee on Urban Scale, which was represented by an attorney named Mario Cuomo. He had recently fought the city as attorney for “The Corona Fighting 69,” a group of 69 Corona homeowners who were going to be displaced by the city in order to build a new high school on the site of their homes. After intense opposition, the city eventually dropped the plan….Community Board 7 voted against a plan that would provide money for the redevelopment of Flushing Airport but stated they wanted to “phase it out.”

In an extensive Tribune exposé, reporter Hank Sheinkopf revealed the squalid living conditions in old houses on 137th Street in Flushing. Ramshackle, boarded-up and burned-out houses were the rule in what looked like a scene from the Ozarks during the Depression. The Tribune’s editorial featured only a photo of one of the pitiful and decrepit houses, with the words “People Live Here!”....

At its February meeting the Stevenson Regular Democratic Club picked an Electchester housewife, Nettie Mayersohn, to be the female co-leader with Donald Manes….

Plans for a theater in Flushing Meadows seemed brighter by June as Joseph Kutrzeba, founder of the Queens Playhouse, announced that the old Theaterama of the World’s Fair New York State Pavilion was being refurbished with seats, a stage and other improvements. His group fought for over seven years to obtain the structure for Queens’ first professional repertory theater.... After months of bitter meetings, demonstrations and politicking, it appeared in late May that a compromise might be reached to settle the controversial Forest Hills low-income housing dispute. Mayor John Lindsay announced that he was appointing Queens attorney Mario Cuomo to conduct an independent study to see if a compromise was possible. Cuomo was offered space at Queens Borough Hall by Donald Manes so that the two could meet with residents on both sides of the dispute.... A major proposal was issued to make Flushing Meadows the site of the borough’s celebration of the upcoming bicentennial in 1976.... Rockefeller reversed his decision in September and restored funding for York College in Jamaica....

Donald Manes announced that a compromise had been adopted by Mario Cuomo to reduce the height of the proposed Forest Hills housing and convert it from a low-income project into a “low-income housing cooperative.”....

Plans were announced to restore the Theaterama building from the 1964-65 World’s Fair.

The political season got going in Queens in late September when First Lady Pat Nixon came to Flushing to campaign for her husband’s re-election... In November the Board of Estimate approved the Mario Cuomo compromise for the Forest Hills project....

In November two major projects finally opened, changing the cultural climate of the borough. The Queens Museum, the first in the borough’s history, opened in the old 1939 World’s Fair’s New York City Building. Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Hoving joined Mayor John Lindsay in opening the museum, which occupied one gallery on the ground level of the building. Down the road in the park, the long-awaited Queens Playhouse opened in the New York State Pavilion. Its first production was of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.” The Tribune’s theater reviewer hailed the show as “superb.”....

Henry A. Sheinkopf

Hank was 22 when he became a reporter for the Trib, and he has since moved to a 30-year career as a political consultant, working on Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign and some 600 other endeavors, domestically and internationally.

John Lindsay was the Mayor. Nixon sat in the White House. Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was filmed – not taped – right here in New York City. Subways had no numbers. We used the IRT, BMT or IND to get to the City. If you owned a car you were doing well. If you owned your house, you were a genius.

A first-grade detective made about 10 grand a year. You took the subways at night, and figured you’d better up your life insurance. “Your money or your life” was heard too often. The Bronx was on fire. Manhattan needed a good cleaning. Staten Island had just started to meet its new immigrants from Brooklyn. And Brooklyn? The stain of Walter O’Malley’s crime – moving the Dodgers to a freeway called Los Angeles – kicked the place so hard it couldn’t get up no matter how its citizens tried.

And then there was Queens. Cleaner streets. Neighborhoods with private homes. People drove everywhere. It was the place you could stretch out in. Manhattan’s non-suburban bedroom. Ethnics galore. Queens rightfully wanted to keep what was ailing the rest of this town from banging down its doors.

That was the world in which the Queens Tribune was born. The city around it going through an exodus of middle-income people who couldn’t live with the filth, the crime, the fear. Life was too short to worry about the guy sitting next to you on the subway even in the light. School strikes? Fun City? Fun for whom? Not for the middle income people who paid the bills.

Workers load some of the first art pieces into the Queens Museum.

You needed a paper that could talk about community issues, which, translated into Queens English, means make them protect our neighborhoods. Tell the politicians what’s up, so they don’t forget. Write an editorial bashing the offenders of quality of life, and value its defenders. That’s what community based journalism is supposed to do. And what the Queens Tribune has consistently done.

I was a young reporter, all of 22 when Gary Ackerman said “here’s a couple of bucks, get to work.” You took the limited dough, because there wasn’t much more. I wrote about cops, crime, city jails, dirty streets, unsafe parks, and learned to drink at Pep McGuire’s across from Borough Hall. But most of what I wrote was stories about the borough that had a right to say that the big shots too often forgot about the people from Sunnyside or Long Island City, Little Neck and every neighborhood in between. If I were starting out today, I’d be writing the same things. Because the job of a community based newspaper doesn’t change.

Police separate a man and the Rev. Timothy Mitchell (r.) during a board of Estimates hearing on 108th Street low-income housing.

If you ever wonder why they started paying attention to Queens, you might think it was the famous snow storm that almost retired Lindsay four years early. Or maybe it was the scatter site housing battle, which I also covered. Better bet? It was the Queens Tribune. The Hank Sheinkopfs that followed after me wrote the news that mattered to the people of Queens. And they should never stop. We used typewriters. They have word processing computers that fly at speeds faster than light. No matter, the beat’s the same. Hope I see you at the 70 th birthday of the paper that fights to protect everything you’ve got. And boy do they do it well.