Graffiti Covered Businesses On Linden Blvd. Get Facelifts

by Keach Hagey, Eastern/Southeastern Queens Editor October 07, 2004

Johnny’s Liquors was one of more than a dozen businesses on Linden Bouelvard in Cambria Heights to get a new coat of paint on Saturday. (photo by Bob Perez)    More than a dozen businesses on Cambria Heights’ Linden Bouelvard shopping strip got a new coat of paint on Saturday, thanks to a group of former graffiti offenders under the supervision of the 105th Precinct.    “It was a kind of poetic justice,” said Kevin Jemmott, president of the Cambria Heights Civic Association, which initiated the cleanup.

“People were complaining that Linden Boulevard was not as nice as they felt it should be. They didn’t want to leave the Cambria Heights area to do their shopping, but they would like the aesthetics to be nicer.”    While the civic association was looking for quick and easy ways to improve the look of the shopping strip over the summer, Jemmott met with Borough President Helen Marshall and found out about her office’s graffiti cleanup task force.    Barbara Decosta, chairwoman of the association’s Economic Development Committee, drove up and down the strip and collected addresses of problem spots from 219th to 230th Streets, and then turned them in to the borough president. The sites included a tire shop, a Chinese restaurant, a hardware store and a day care center.    “The response was very good,” she said. “Many of the business owners wanted to work with us to provide help with paint or manpower, but they just couldn’t afford to clean it up on their own.”    Henry Brown, an employee at Johnny’s Liquors at 222nd Street and Linden Boulevard, said his place of employment looks “much better” with the graffiti painted out.    Evan Archer, a broker at Just Real Estate on Linden Bouelvard, was happy to see that the red and black lettering scrawled on his workplace six months ago had been painted over with a color to match its bricks. “It looks much better,” he said.    He has worked on Linden Bouelvard since 1982 and seen its evolution into a real commercial strip.    “There have been improvements. There are more businesses now than there used to be. There are fewer vacancies, which is a good sign. We just have to convince people to stop dropping their refuse on the street,” he said.    He was aware of the strip’s recent acquisition of new trash cans, but said, “trash cans are stationary. They can’t follow people around.”    Now that the graffiti has been painted over, Decosta said the civic association plans to move forward with its campaign to put promotional banners on the street, hopefully by the end of the year.