• Worked with Postmaster to make Jackson Heights Post Office more accessible to seniors, disabled and those with baby carriages starting in the spring of 2004



• Protecting residents by fighting for $500,000 for traffic and safety improvements on Queens Boulevard



• Has secured millions of dollars to soundproof schools from the noise caused by LaGuardia Airport



• Secured $100,000 from the EPA to conduct an air quality study for Northwestern Queens, paying particular attention to the problems brought on by LaGuardia Airport



• Successfully persuaded the VA to open a Veterans Outpatient Health Clinic in Sunnyside, at 41-03 Queens Boulevard, (Between 41st Street and Queens Blvd)



• Created a Home Ownership program in conjunction with the New York City Central Labor Counsel that is creating real home ownership opportunities, such as for Mr. Omar Pena Castro of Jackson Heights, a member of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Local Union 1



• Worked with the U.S. Department of State to pressure the government of Indonesia to release the results of its autopsy of Jafar Saddiq Hamzah of Jackson Heights and to conduct an open and transparent investigation into his death.



• Secured Federal funding for a Business Improvement District for Jackson Heights Merchants Association



• Working for Federal funding for the Expansion of the Jackson Heights Library Branch



• Secured $640,000 in Federal funding for the Jackson Heights/Victor Moore Arcade study that is a community-based congestion reduction, traffic flow improvement and intermodal transfer study. This will incorporate the major roadways and arterials, including the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Roosevelt Avenue and Broadway.



• Brought $100,000 in Federal funding to Latin Technologies, a not-for-profit technology education center, to help fund a comprehensive job training program for community youth in telecommunications and information technology



• Brought $18,500 in Federal funding for the Latin American Integration Center for youth to develop ways to improve safety in schools and public spaces



• Improving quality of life by securing over $13,000 each for the Jackson Heights Action Group and the Jackson Heights Beautification Society

Jackson Heights

Jackson Heights is a neighborhood in northwestern Queens, bounded to the north by Astoria Boulevard, to the east by 94th Street and Junction Boulevard, to the south by Roosevelt Avenue, and to the west by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It consisted originally of farmland rising sixty-five feet (nineteen meters) above the surrounding lowlands in the sparsely populated of Trains Meadows. The land was bought in 1908 by a syndicate of bankers and real-estate agents called the Queensboro Realty Company, led by Edward A. MacDougal: Justice P. Henry Dugro was an agent.

After the Queensboro Bridge opened in 1909 the area became more attractive to developers, and by the end of 1910 the syndicate had acquired 350 acres (140 hectares) of land. It prevailed on the city to close Trains Meadow Road and lay out streets in a regular grid pattern numbered consecutively (1st Street became the present 54th Street), and on Interborough Rapid Transit to extend a line into Queens, for which Roosevelt Avenue was specially built. The neighborhood was named for a street that ran through it, Jackson Avenue (now Northern Boulevard). An elevated line opened in May 1917 with four stations in Jackson Heights: 74th Street, 82nd Street, Elmhurst Avenue, and Junction Boulevard. The first apartment building was erected at 82nd Street and Northern Boulevard in 1911, and by 1912 there were eight miles (thirteen kilometers) of paved streets with sidewalks, curbs, and gutters, and five miles (eight kilometers) of sewers.

During the next twenty years Queensborough Realty engaged prominent architects to design two-family houses and especially the apartment buildings for which the neighborhood became known, many bordering the streets on two sides and separated from each other by a communal garden; there were also a golf course and a community center. An innovator in urban and suburban housing, the corporation offered cooperative apartments as early as 1920 and semidetached houses known as garden apartments from 1923; it also practiced exclusionary policies aimed at Jews, Catholics, and blacks. The neighborhood had 3600 residents in 1920, and in 1922 double-decker buses began offering service from 82nd Street to 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Suites of two to seven rooms in apartment buildings were rented for $90 to $200 a month in 1928. By the beginning of the Depression the entire tract had been built up except the northern section near Astoria Boulevard and the eastern section near Junction Boulevard, but these areas as well were gradually developed during the 1930s. The population increased during the 1930s from 44,000 to 54,290 in part because of the opening of the Independent subway to Roosevelt Avenue on 19 August 1933. A large number of immigrants settled in Jackson Heights in the 1980s, especially from Columbia, China, and the Dominican Republic and to a lesser extent from India, Ecuador, Korea, Guyana, Peru, Cuba, and Pakistan.

The neighborhood is also the home of the largest Argentinean community in New York City. In the mid 1990s Jackson Heights was a well-maintained neighborhood with apartment buildings and expansive one-family houses.

Vincent Seyfried, Encyclopedia of New York City, Edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1995.