Community Corner

Stuchinski: Banner Year For Forest Hills Civic

Strong community ties helped endure trials, celebrate victories in 2010.

Barbara Stuchinski is the president of the Forest Hills Community and Civic Association.

Any community association is only as good as the sum of its parts.  While we undertake local issues such as rezoning strictly as the Forest Hills Community and Civic Association, we also reach out to include many other groups in local events. 

Of course, our major accomplishment in 2010 was finally attending the opening of the . We began this undertaking some 17 years ago working with elected officials to secure the land for the school site.  Students from our neighborhood were forced to go to Hillcrest High School in Jamaica and that was unacceptable and had to be corrected by building a new high school on Metropolitan Avenue. 

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Our civic participates and assists in the annual American Legion Memorial Day Parade along Metropolitan Avenue.  We also co-sponsor the annual 9-11 Memorial Ceremony with the American Legion at Remsen Cemetery Park.  Together with the Forest Hills Kiwanis, we held our annual children's Halloween event that brings children from all neighboring areas as well. 

This year, we began an event that we hope to present yearly.  Together with and the New York City Parks Dept. we held a Puppet Show at our Austin Street Park. 

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We held two major civic meetings this year.  In August, we sponsored a Town Hall Meeting with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and many city commissioners at   And in November, .  Both meetings afforded residents the opportunity to ask the questions that they were concerned about and the results were very positive.

The civic, together with Kidz Care, a junior civic, did considerable work in many of our Park areas planting, landscaping and tidying up after the Sept. 16 storm.  We also planted a daffodil tribute to a Communty Board 6 member who was dedicated to keeping the community graffiti-free. 

During the chaos of the Sept. 16 storm and for days after, our civic members joined in efforts to keep traffic moving, secure the fallen trees and other hazards, check on neighbors to make sure they were safe and generally undertook whatever task was required to get our community cleaned up.

The civic moves into 2011 with our focus on preserving the original Remsen headstones.  Naturally, we will confront whatever other task pops up and continue to work towards maintaining the quality of life in Forest Hills.


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