Light Up Kew Gardens

We are the We Love Kew Gardens community group. Our mission is to improve the quality of life for residents of Kew Gardens. Through the years, we have made many improvements to the neighborhood, such as an Earth Day clean-up along Kew Gardens Rd., had our local councilmember help us get Kew Gardens Cinema park get cleaned up, obtained new garbage cans throughout the neighborhood and donated poop bag stations to the local dog park to name a few.

Over the last several years, our community has faced many difficult situations. We have many empty storefronts due to the excessive rent increases. The MTA/LIRR owns the property over the historic Lefferts Blvd. bridge and has allowed those properties to deteriorate, forcing some businesses to close. Although community volunteers managed to keep them from tearing down the bridge to build luxury high-rise apartments, we are still waiting for the deteriorated property to be fixed. If that wasn't bad enough, the new borough-based jail is being built in Kew Gardens, to the dismay of us all, and will only add to the congestion, traffic, lack of parking and safety concerns and won't solve the systemic problems in our corrections system.

Almost all surrounding areas have a chamber of commerce or a business improvement district that helps them fund holiday street lights along their main streets along with local council members' discretionary funds. We want to give our community some festivity during the holiday season to help our local businesses do better, deter crime and give our residents some joy, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on us all.

We lowered the budget to $11,400 but are still far short of the amount needed. As our plan B, we are doing a community project and have purchased lovely snowflake string lights and illuminated hanging stars to hang inside the shop windows along Lefferts Blvd. We also partnered with PS 99 with the help of the Parent's Association for the kids to do secular decorations to decorate the shops, so our strip has a quaint and festive Main Street feel. Most of the money raised has come from the residents in the neighborhood, so we will decorate every store that wants it but the several local businesses that gave donations will receive a little more sparkle! We will

also used some of the money we raised to supply our volunteers with water, snacks and a pizza lunch from Dani’s. Any funds left over will be used for a utter project this spring. We love our neighborhood and want it to shine with the glow it deserves. Thank you so much.