Mayor pledges to restore shuttered South Jamaica community center
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Nine-year-old Amaryllis Greene questions Mayor Bill de Blasio at a town hall in South Jamaica on Wednesday. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.
By Victoria Merlino
After a decade of disuse, a South Jamaica community center will re-open, Mayor Bill de Blasio told neighborhood residents at a town hall Wednesday, less than a month after a teen was shot and killed on a local basketball court.
The city will re-open the Baisley Park Houses Community Center in response to demands from local leaders and residents, who have called on the city to invest more money in Southeast Queens amid an uptick in violence. The community space will be named after Amir Griffin, a 14-year-old boy who was hit by a stray bullet and killed while playing basketball last month.
“Policing is one part of the answer,” de Blasio said at the town hall. “But serving our young people better, and giving our young people more positive options, giving them places to be and things to do that help them to be safe is another crucial part of the answer.”
The community center closed in 2008 after 20 years of operation, due to NYCHA budget cuts.
The Police Athletic League Center in Jamaica will also see an increase in funding and operating hours, de Blasio said.
Aamir’s aunt, Tiffany Griffin, was one of the first to question the mayor, expressing grief over the loss of her nephew while balancing her work as an employee for the Department of Correction. “My greatest concern is having to provide care, custody and control for the individual who killed my nephew. That is a struggle for me,” she told de Blasio.
She expressed concern over the city’s supervised release program, criticizing the program’s use of incentives such as Mets tickets to get defendants to make their court dates.
De Blasio asserted that supervised release was a necessary program, and that reports of defendants getting perks like Mets tickets were overblown. “A whole generation of people got arrested who did not need to be arrested to begin with,” he said.
Fourth grader Amaryllis Greene also had some tough questions for de Blasio.
“Why is the MTA never on time?” she began, spouting off a long list of questions before asking “With all due respect, why was Mr. Benjamin Tucker not selected as police commissioner?” referring to the NYPD second-in-command, an African American man, who was passed over for the police commissioner title in favor of Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea.
“Can I call you future Council member Greene? Can I call you that?” de Blasio asked her.
