During the Christmas season last year, light posts along Jericho Turnpike between Herricks Road and Denton Avenue were decorated with brightly lit snowflakes.
The 15 oversized snowflakes may have gone unnoticed by some passers-by in the blur of the holiday season, but they represented a small victory for the Garden City Park Civic Association.
While the Village of New Hyde Park had seasonal lights festooned along Jericho, there was a notable absence of them along the main thoroughfare that also traverses the roughly mile-square area that defines Garden City Park. So Paul Noetzel and other members of the Garden City Park Civic took action.
Noetzel found a local vendor offering a good price on the snowflakes, bought 30 of them and worked through Town of North Hempstead Councilman Angelo Ferrara to get town workers to install the requisite fixtures to mount 15 of them. All of them will be displayed on Jericho Turnpike during the holiday season this year.
“It was a big deal with people. It was quite a bit of jumping though hoops with people, but we got it,” said Noetzel, who is currently president of the association.
The Garden City Park civic, originally established in 1965, went through a decades-long dormant period before being revitalized in 2007 by Noetzel and other members of the community.
“It kind of fizzled out for a number of years,” Noetzel said.
The civic focuses on local issues, according to Noetzel, and the Christmas lights are an ongoing concern for a civic organization trying to establish an identity for its community.
The Garden City Park Civic’s biggest issue to date following its revitalizatiion is the ongoing upgrade of Jericho Turnpike. That project involves the state Department of Transportation plans to restore the roadbed and install safety measures such as countdown crosswalk lights and a central median while the Village of New Hyde Park proceeds with plans for bulbouts – rounded curbs at some corners – and benches to make the New Hyde Park shopping district more comfortable for shoppers to walk through it.
“It continues to be an uphill battle to make our strip of Jericho more pedestrian-friendly. One of the major issues is slowing traffic down,” said Noetzel.
He said members of the Garden City Park organization came out in force to express their feelings to DOT engineers at a hearing in New Hyde Park Memorial High School on the Jericho upgrade plans shortly after the reorganization of the civic took place.
A current issue of concern is the fulfillment of an agreement with the town to mount a “Welcome to Garden City Park” sign at the current construction site of the Wells Fargo Bank branch at the intersection of Jericho Turnpike and Herricks Road.
The sign that the developer and the town agreed to erect, according to Noetzel, is conspicuously absent from the building plans and the civic is working through Ferrara to restore it.
“Identity is a big issue for our community. A lot of people don’t know we’re there,” Noetzel said.
Noetzel said Ferrara has been an ally of the civic on other issues, including parking restrictions along streets bordering the Long Island Rail Road Merrillon Avenue station on Nassau Boulevard. The civic successfully lobbied the town through Ferrara to revise parking restrictions that would prevent LIRR commuters from parking on residential streets early in the day while allowing residents to park their cars on the streets in the afternoon.
“We’re such a small community, the local problems tend to be limited,” Noetzel said.
But the 110 members of the civic do get involved in larger issues. They submitted comments to the town on the controversial issue of acquiring open space in Roslyn Heights to revive the Roslyn Country Club as a town park. Noetzel said the Garden City Park organization also maintains communications with its neighboring civic associations in New Hyde Park.
The organization is in a summer hiatus now, but monthly meetings at Garden City Park VFW Post 120 on Jericho Road will resume in September. The revival of the civic was also accompanied by the creation of a Web site, www.gcpcivic.org, where information on its activities – and the opportunity to join the organization – are available.
