Private streets and winds farms

I remember rotary phones and telephone booths, so I'm part of the dinosaur subset of the population that actuaries predict will soon return to the primordial soup and revert to pre-birth non-existence.

Like when I was a kid, I deal only in superlatives now. It used to be who would win a battle between Superman and Batman. Now I just want to know what is the fastest thing in the world.

Easy. The Forest Hills Gardens car-booting brigade.

If you park anywhere in this Queens neighborhood, where the willow trees are content in the knowledge they too are elite, your car will be immobilized so fast that it will make a speeding bullet seem to have been anesthetized by comparison. An exception might be made for a pediatric ambulance, provided the driver left a notarized note on the windshield saying he went off to pee and would be back in two minutes.

The community was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also has Central Park to his credit. The Tudor homes, architectural contrasts and streets that have as much character individualism as can be found among a random cross-section of people, make it as lovely as it is beyond purchasable reach by the hoi polloi. 

Although they are part of the city and receive all the taxpayer-funded services, their streets. due to a more than a 100-year-old legal accommodation, are private, so non-residents cannot park there like they could elsewhere. Their residents are as well-connected as they are well-heeled.

Their autonomy, though limited, can sometimes render the NYPD helpless to their will. 

An annual series of concerts, which will begin May 31, was almost canceled because of complications resulting from decibel-averse residents' anticipatory noise complaints and the police being barred from controlling the surrounding private streets. Concerns were partially justified, as last year's level broke the permitted sound barrier, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards attributed the residents' objections to "racial overtones," adding "it is what it is.” All things are what they are, except when they are not. We can't look into peoples' hearts, but I'd bet the protests would be just as vociferous if the performers were belting out Richard Wagner's Twilight of the Gods.

The NYPD issued sound amplification permits as part of an agreement that puts a private security firm retained by Tiebreaker Productions in charge of the bucolic sanctuary roads near the Forest Hills Stadium, the concert venue where many years ago the U.S. Open Tennis Championships were held. Now the NYPD won't have to worry about any of their cruisers being booted.

Are there any other neighborhoods in New York City like Forest Hills Gardens? Will they keep their special status in perpetuity? And will the Long Island Rail Road get them as well to Penn Station in hardly longer than a standard television commercial break?

Penn Station, having reached its apex of decrepitude, will soon be undergoing a $7 billion upgrade by the federal government, which snatched the project from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Trusting the MTA to conform to a budget and time frame is like putting faith in leeches to cure anemia.

Putting the feds in charge must not open the door to the president or any member of his family, company or associates getting no-bid contracts or being allowed at any time to tap into or siphon off profits.

The makeover will hopefully prove that Aesthetics and Function are not irreconcilable. Neither are economics and reverence for life. Allegations that wind farms are killing off whales and other sea life on a large scale have not been scientifically substantiated, though the charge has been unscientifically denied.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has halted, at least temporarily, the multi-billion-dollar Empire Wind 1 wind energy project, which, if we take assurances at face value, would have furnished power to a half-million homes off our coast. Its federal lease had already been signed and applicable permits obtained during President Trump's first term. 

Burgum's critics cry that the federal spike will cost many jobs and aggravate the climate crisis. Trump has never been a friend of clean energy and quipped about the extinction of entire species being preferable to arrested industrial development. 

This commentary has been thematically all over the map. Whatever the problems are, and wherever human failure arises, the only hope for honorable solutions will spring from the judgments made by a matured generation of the children we educate now.