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New York's Sixth Congressional District

Jamaica Queens:

Jamaica Center, the downtown section of Jamaica, Queens, is one of the most varied areas in the borough, and it's one at a crossroads. A clothing store mecca, retail space along Jamaica Avenue between Parsons Boulevard and 165th Street is thriving. Art deco buildings and a colonial-era church once abandoned are getting renovated. At the same time, the area hurts for decent restaurants and a respite from choking traffic and a lack of parking.

King Manor Museum

90-04 161 Street, Suite 704, Jamaica, New York 11432
King Manor is proud to be an established site on the Heritage New York Underground Railroad Heritage Trail.
Today the centerpiece of an 11-acre New York City park in Jamaica, Queens, King Manor Museum was the home and farm of Founding Father Rufus King from 1805 to 1827.  Rufus King was an author of the U.S. Constitution, as well as one of New York's first United States Senators, Ambassador to Great Britain and an early, and outspoken, opponent of slavery.  King Manor later became the estate of King's son, John Alsop King, who served as New York's Governor.  King Manor has been a museum since 1900. 

St. Albans

St. Albans is a middle-class neighborhood in southeastern Queens, New York. The neighborhood is famous for the jazz legends who lived in its ritzy enclave Addisleigh Park. These days St. Albans is home to middle-class African Americans and growing numbers of Caribbean immigrants and Caribbean-Americans. St. Albans lacks a subway, but has a LIRR station and is close to the Belt and Cross Island Parkways. Housing development is booming, which has brought the strains of higher density living

New York City

A world mecca for tourism and entertainment. Throngs flock to Times Square every day of the year. Dozens of movies and TV shows are shot in NYC's streets every week. At any given time, hundreds of musical performances and stage plays are being produced. But some of New York City's entertainment meccas are little-known. St. George, Staten Island and Bayside, Queens could each claim status as actors' colonies in the past, and early motion pictures were shot at Brooklyn's Vitagraph Studios in Midwood.

Universities:

York College
St. Johns University

Far Rockaway:

Far Rockaway is one of the four neighborhoods on the Rockaway Peninsula in the New York City borough of Queens in the United States. It describes the easternmost section of the Rockaways, usually the area east of Beach 77th Street, comprising the neighborhoods of Bayswater, Edgemere, Arverne, as well as Far Rockaway proper and Downtown Far Rockaway. The neighborhood is part of Queens Community Board 14.[1]
Far Rockaway's character is that of an inner-city, oceanfront commuter town, in some ways having more in common with Asbury Park, New Jersey than with New York City. Far Rockaway is one of the most distant New York neighborhoods from Manhattan, the cultural and financial center of New York City. Formerly populated by Eastern European Jewish and Irish immigrants, it now has a large African American population, though the westernmost portion still remains mostly Irish. Downtown Far Rockaway has a moderately large Central American population. There is also a large Orthodox Jewish population in the easternmost part of Far Rockaway, which borders Inwood and Lawrence, and other areas in the densely-Jewish Five Towns area across the Nassau County border. The area is home to a large and growing number of Haredi Jews with a large network of yeshivas and Jewish communal needs.
Recently, the area is being renewed with new beach houses and waterfront development. There has been a steady attempt at cleaning up the area, and along with its rough appearance, the crime rate is relatively high.

A subway viaduct on a background of Far Rockaway residential buildings

districtny06
A subway viaduct on a background of Far Rockaway residential buildings
Far Rockaway is one of two New York City neighborhoods whose subway terminus is within realistic walking distance of the city limits (the Wakefield section of the Bronx is the other). This fact led to an interesting scenario in 1985, when New York City banned the sale of spray-paint cans to persons under the age of 18, in an effort to stem the tide of graffiti in the city; teenagers would travel across the city line into either Nassau County (after getting off the subway at the last stop in Far Rockaway) or Westchester County (from the last stop in Wakefield) to purchase spray paint there (Nassau County has since followed suit and prohibited spray-paint sales to minors, but Westchester County has not).

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A transportation hub for the 21st century: the neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens

Once home to an ancient trail, utilized by native tribes from as far away as the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, Jamaica eventually grew into a major trading post for farmers, with the road currently known as Jamaica Avenue called the "King's Highway." In 1913, the original Long Island Rail Road LIRR) station in Jamaica was completed; the elevated "subway" followed 5 years later. Due to its proximity to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the population centers on the north and south shores of Long Island, Jamaica Station became the central transfer point on the LIRR. Today, this nexus is defined by the new, $316-million Jamaica Control Center (JCC)/Vertical Circulation Building (VCB)--known as Jamaica Station--which was developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Collaborating with the Port Authority's own construction team and overseeing building of the JCC/VCB project was Tishman Construction Corp., which, in a joint venture with Bechtel Infrastructure, served as construction manager to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on this 7-story, 250,000-square-foot interconnecting terminal and office building. Designed by Port Authority architects and engineers, the JCC/VCB is truly inter-modal in nature. Passengers are able to connect in Jamaica with an 8.1-mile AirTrain JFK, 740 daily LIRR trains, three New York City Transit subway lines, and a dozen local bus lines to points across Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.

The Jamaica Control Center houses administrative offices for the LIRR and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Police on five floors. The adjoining Vertical Circulation Building comprises the public portion of the terminal. The heart of the passenger portion within the facility is the fourth-floor AirTrain Public Concourse, which features the potential for baggage check-in and ticketing, and connects to the AirTrain platform. The project also includes a mezzanine bridge, having a segmented-arch, barrel-vault "portal" overhead, which links the public concourse to the LIRR and subway lines. The bridge serves a dual function as the new mezzanine for transfers between LIRR platforms and the subway station. The project's scope also included renovations and improvements to the subway mezzanine level, in addition to the resurfacing of LIRR platforms and renovation of the canopies above.

The first floor of the terminal has a street-level entrance and a vehicular drop-off area; this part of the building opens to a 9-story, 2,000-square-foot glass atrium that connects to the fourth-floor concourse via two glass-and-steel-enclosed elevators, two escalators, and a stairway. The structure was designed to accommodate an additional 10 stories in the future.

The facility also features a global fire-alarm system that monitors the station building, the train platforms, and the mechanical rooms and informational kiosks on those platforms via separate panels that feed into a central panel to alert firefighters to the exact location of a fire.

Since Jamaica is an active train station, much of the construction was performed at night or on the weekends to allow the station to remain in continuous operation throughout the project. For work that needed to be conducted during weekdays (and to allow for the fast-track schedule), selected tracks were shut down through a coordinated effort between the construction team and LIRR's rail-traffic control.

The vision and efforts among the project team are clearly evident now that the Jamaica Station project is complete. Today, this transportation hub retains its preeminence as both a crossroads and a design destination.

JUDGES' COMMENTS: "This is a model approach to any urban transportation project. An extremely identifiable design, highly visible, environmentally correct in every sense of the word, and, most importantly, pedestrian friendliness makes this a project that can be used as a foundation stone on which to build similar projects."

  • Citation of Excellence
    Jamaica Station
    Queens, NY
  • Submitting Company
    Tishman Construction Corp., New York, NY
  • Project Team (not all-inclusive)
    The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
    developer, owner, architect, engineer; Tishman Construction Corp.
    and Bechtel Infrastructure, construction managers.
  • Project Specifics
    Building type/use: Multi-modal transportation hub/office building
    Square footage: 250,000 square feet
    Project cost: $316 million
    Project completion: March 2006

Jamaica is a neighborhood in the borough of Queens in New York City. It was settled under Dutch rule in 1656 in New Netherland as Rustdorp.[1] Under British rule, it became the center of the Town of Jamaica. Jamaica was the county seat of Queens County from the formation of the county in 1683 until March 7, 1788, when the town was reorganized by the state government and the county seat was moved to Mineola (now part of Nassau County). When Queens was incorporated into the City of Greater New York in 1898, both the Town of Jamaica and the Village of Jamaica were dissolved, but the neighborhood of Jamaica regained its role as county seat. The neighborhood is part of Queens Community Board 12.[2]
Previously known as one of the predominantly African American neighborhoods in the borough of Queens, Jamaica in recent years has been undergoing a sharp influx of other ethnicities. It has a substantial concentration of West Indian immigrants, Indians, Arabs, Russians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans as well as many long-established African American families. A few[clarify] East Asian families are also known to have recently put down roots in Jamaica.[citation needed]
The neighborhood of Jamaica is completely unrelated to the Caribbean nation of Jamaica (although Jamaican immigrants do live in the area); the name similarity is a coincidence. The English, who took it over in 1664, named the area "Jameco," for the Jameco Native Americans, who resided on the northern shores of Jamaica Bay, and whose name means "beaver" in Algonquian languages.[3]
Jamaica is the location of several government buildings including Queens Civil Court and the civil branch of the Queens County Supreme Court. Jamaica Center, the area around Jamaica Avenue and 165th Street, is a major commercial center, as well as the home of the Central Library of the Queens Borough Public Library.
Some locals group Jamaica's surrounding neighborhoods[4] into an unofficial Greater Jamaica, roughly corresponding to the former Town of Jamaica, including Woodhaven, St. Albans, Springfield Gardens, Hollis, Laurelton, Queens Village, Howard Beach and Ozone Park. The New York Racing Association, based at Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, lists its official address as Jamaica (Central Jamaica once housed NYRA's Jamaica Racetrack, now the massive Rochdale Village housing development).

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Economic history and development

Economic development was long neglected. In the 1960s and 1970s, many big box retailers moved into suburban areas where business was more profitable. Such retailers included brand name stores, commercial strips and movie theaters that once thrived in Jamaica's busiest areas. Macy's and the Valencia theater were the last companies to move out in 1969. The 1980's brought in the crack epidemic which created even more hardship as well as crime. Prime real estate spaces were replaced by unsuccessful hair salons and 99 cents stores. Furthermore, existing zoning patterns and inadequete infrastructure did not anticipate future development. However since then, the government reaction towards fighting crime and the recent decrease of the crime rate have provided a positive reaction to potential entrepreneurs who plan to invest in the area. The Greater Jamaica Development Corporation (GJDC) is a long-standing nonprofit organization that has done an excellent job in promoting development. They have acquired valuable real estate and sold them to national chains in order to expand neighborhood opportunities for advancement. As well they have completed underway proposals by allocating funds and providing loans to potential investors who have already established something in the area. One Jamaica Center is a mixed-use commercial complex that was built in 2002 housing Old Navy, Bally Total Fitness, Gap, and a 15-screen multiplex theater. Banking has also made a strong revival as Bank of America, Sterling National Bank, Washington Mutual, and Carver Federal Savings Bank have each created at least one branch along various major streets: Jamaica Avenue, Parsons Boulevard, Merrick Boulevard, and Sutphin Boulevard. A $75 million deal with Home Depot cleared the way for a new location at 168th St. and Archer Ave.
The most prominent piece of development has been the creation of the Sutphin Boulevard transit hub aka "Jamaica Station" which was fully completed in 2003. It includes the Sutphin Blvd. E, J, and Z subway subway station, LIRR, and the Airtrain JFK which provides a 5-7 minute direct ride from Jamaica to John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Airtrain station remains the central figure for ongoing economic progress. With the growing number of riders each day passing through this station, the city is providing some major changes to the surrounding blocks of this massive hub of transport.
Currently Jamaica has great potential to be a premier business center in New York City following the examples of major redevelopment occurring in Long Island City, Flushing, and Downtown Brooklyn. In 2005, the New York City Department of City Planning drafted a plan that would rezone 368 blocks of Jamaica in order to stimulate new development, relieve the overwhelming traffic situation, and shift upscale amenities away from low-density residential neighborhoods. The plan includes up-zoning the immediate areas around Jamaica Station to accommodate passengers traveling through the area. To improve infrastructure the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation has agreed to create more greenery and open spaces to allow pedestrians to enjoy the scenery. At the same time, the city has reserved the right to protect the suburban/residential charm of neighboring areas. Several blocks will be down-zoned to keep up with the existing neighborhood character. On September 10,2007 the City Council overwhelmingly approved the plan. Structures of up to 28 stories can be built around the main transit hub as well as residential buildings of up to 7 stories can be built on Hillside Ave. As of today, there are a few up and coming projects. The city economic development corporation has issued an RFP for redevelopment of a 45,000 sq. ft. abandoned garage located at 168th St. and 93rd Ave. Plans are underway to convert this space into retail and parking spots. "TechnoMart Queens" has been the first ever declared approved project. Located at Sutphin Blvd. and 94th Ave., Korean Based Prime Construction Corp., Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, and several other partners have signed a deal to create a 13-story Mega-mall. 9 floors will be dedicated towards wholesale electronics, 3 floors to retail space for shopping, and it is estimated to contain parking for up to 800 cars. Groundbreaking on this site will initiate in late 2008 and is slated for completion by mid-2011. The GJDC has announced in their newsletter that another site adjacent to the mall will be converted into a hotel for Airtrain passengers. Official groundbreaking information has not been released nor declared yet its completion is set for 2010.
Transportation
Jamaica Station is a central transfer point on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), which is headquartered in a building adjoining the station; all but one of the commuter railroad's lines (the exception being the Port Washington Branch) run through Jamaica.
The New York City Subway's IND Queens Boulevard Line (E F) terminates at 179th Street, at the foot of Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood of mansions east of Jamaica's central business district. The Archer Avenue Line, which opened in 1988 (E J Z), terminates at Jamaica Center-Parsons/Archer. Jamaica Center is not just a transit hub; it is also the name of a business and government center that includes a federal office building, and a shopping mall and theater multiplex (One Jamaica Center), and is adjacent to various other businesses and agencies, such as the main forensic laboratory facility for the New York City Police Department.
Jamaica's bus network provides extensive service across eastern Queens, as well as to destinations as distant as Hicksville in Nassau County, Q44 serves to western Bronx, the Rockaways, and Midtown Manhattan. Nearly all bus lines serving Jamaica terminate there; most do so at the 165th Street Bus Terminal or the Jamaica Center subway station.
Jamaica, a large, sprawling neighborhood, is also home to John F. Kennedy International Airport—one of the busiest international airports in the United States and the world— public transportation passengers are connected to airline terminals by AirTrain JFK, which operates as both an airport terminal circulator and rail connection to central Jamaica at the integrated LIRR and bilevel subway station located at Sutphin Blvd and Archer Avenue.
Major streets include Archer Avenue, Hillside Avenue, Jamaica Avenue, Liberty Avenue, Merrick Boulevard, Parsons Boulevard, Guy R. Brewer Boulevard (formerly known as New York Boulevard), and Sutphin Boulevard, as well as the Van Wyck Expressway (I-678) and the Grand Central Parkway.
Neighboring areas are Jamaica Estates, Jamaica Hills, Briarwood, Cambria Heights, St. Albans, Hollis, Queens Village, South Ozone Park, Kew Gardens, Richmond Hill, Laurelton, Rosedale, Brookville, Rochdale, South Jamaica, Springfield Gardens, Hillcrest,Kew Gardens Hills, Fresh Meadows. South Flushing, and Woodhaven.


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