Readers Write: Middle Neck Road a ‘disgrace and an embarrassment’

The Island Now

I’m busy all week, but observe one consistent thing about Great Neck: For over two decades now, Middle Neck Road from Linden all the way to Kings Point, especially in the vicinity of Fairview Avenue and Young Israel, is a disgrace and an embarrassment of emptiness and deterioration.  

Storefronts which are only useful to serve as dumps for periodic local political campaigns predominate.

Austin Street in Forest Hills, from whence we came, remains to this day a thriving mecca. Obviously, in the new marketing economy, there is little hope after 20 years, these scores of empty storefronts in Great Neck will ever bear viable businesses.

While these properties remain vacant, our locals who wish to downsize from houses have very few upper-middle or high-end condominium units from which to choose.

That North Shore Towers should be the “naturally-occurring retirement community” for Great Neck is absurd. But the selection up north is equally limited for those younger locals who want condos and/or cannot afford houses.

This silliness like the recent war until the North School lot was approved for groundbreaking is why I limit my local involvement.

Only local stupidity can be the cause of more than two decades of obfuscation of the obvious. Of course, we don’t want to create Queens Boulevard on Middle Neck Road, but contrary to the hysterics around here of pseudo-intellectuals who oppose everything, another two or three modern-day versions of One Kensington Gate is exactly what the Middle Neck Road corridor needs.

It would appear that people around here with little else to do would like to keep these debates going for the rest of our natural lives. Reminds me of fights amongst faculty in university settings: “The fights are so great because the stakes are so small.”

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld

Great Neck

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