ManorMatters March 1, 2023 article about the upcoming The Douglaston Story Project:
dma.communitysite.com/file/document/1324975771/UKIVJ9Yj6uqrAW1e.pdf
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December 1, 2022.
Douglaston, NY. On Saturday, December 10th, the Douglaston Local Development Corporation will host its 5th Annual Douglaston Village Winter Festival.
The free, outdoor community event will be held at the Douglaston Station Plaza, next to the LIRR station at 235th & 41st Avenue on Saturday, December 10th from 12 pm - 3 pm.
Thanks to the generous support of our City Council Member Vickie Paladino and the New York City Department of Transportation, the Douglaston LDC is excited to offer the community another day to gather at our local Plaza and celebrate the holiday season. There will be local organizations participating, such as the Douglas Manor Environmental Organization, the Douglaston Little Neck Historical Society, Udalls Cove Preservation Committee, Kiwanis Club of Douglaston, local area Churches, Schools, and local vendors selling holiday gifts.
There will be a DJ spinning holiday music, free activities for the children in the village square to get families and friends in a festive spirit. There will be a magician, balloon animals, arts & crafts, games, contests and much more. For further details, please visit: www.dougldc.org or www.facebook.com/DouglastonLDC
The Douglaston Local Development Corporation (DLDC) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2009 by Douglaston residents, merchants and other stakeholders to preserve and protect the unique historical and aesthetic qualities of the Douglaston Village commercial district.
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Contact:
Rebecca Gellos - Executive Director
Douglaston Local Development Corporation
234-21 41st Ave, Douglaston, NY 11363
347-946-0017
[email protected]
June 15, 2019
[6/15/2019] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE The Douglaston Local Development Corp opens a ‘Little Free Library’ in LIRR Station Plaza. Douglaston, NY ‐ Little Free Libraries are a global phenomenon. The small, front‐yard book exchanges number more than 75,000 around the world in 85 countries — from Iceland to Tasmania to Pakistan. Now, a new Little Free Library at Douglaston Station Plaza will join the movement to share books, bring people together and create communities of readers.
The Douglaston LDC will launch their Little Free Library on Friday, June 21 at 7:30 p.m., open to the public. The celebration will be part of our Movie Night series. Chris Campese, the DLDC Board president says, “It’s our hope that this Little Free Library will bring a little more joy, a little more connection and a whole lot more books to our community. One more small thing that will bring people to our unique plaza.”
The Little Free Library nonprofit organization has been honored by the Library of Congress, the National Book Foundation, and the American Library Association, and Reader’s Digest named them one of the “50 Surprising Things We Love about America.” Each year, nearly 10 million books are shared in Little Free Libraries. To learn more, please visit littlefreelibrary.org.
The Douglaston Local Development Corporation (DLDC) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2010 by Douglaston residents, merchants and other stakeholders to preserve and protect the unique historical and aesthetic qualities of the Douglaston Village commercial district.
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Contact:
Rebecca Gellos
Executive Director
Douglaston Local Development Corporation
8 Prospect Avenue, Douglaston, NY 11363
347-946-0017
[email protected]
The Douglaston LDC will launch their Little Free Library on Friday, June 21 at 7:30 p.m., open to the public. The celebration will be part of our Movie Night series. Chris Campese, the DLDC Board president says, “It’s our hope that this Little Free Library will bring a little more joy, a little more connection and a whole lot more books to our community. One more small thing that will bring people to our unique plaza.”
The Little Free Library nonprofit organization has been honored by the Library of Congress, the National Book Foundation, and the American Library Association, and Reader’s Digest named them one of the “50 Surprising Things We Love about America.” Each year, nearly 10 million books are shared in Little Free Libraries. To learn more, please visit littlefreelibrary.org.
The Douglaston Local Development Corporation (DLDC) is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2010 by Douglaston residents, merchants and other stakeholders to preserve and protect the unique historical and aesthetic qualities of the Douglaston Village commercial district.
####
Contact:
Rebecca Gellos
Executive Director
Douglaston Local Development Corporation
8 Prospect Avenue, Douglaston, NY 11363
347-946-0017
[email protected]
March 2019
The DLDC is very excited to introduce it's newest board members:
Andrea Licari-LaGrassa
Andrea is Professor at St. John’s University where she is also the Director of the Fashion and Lifestyle Institute. She has been instrumental in raising funds for our community for: Save the Dock Drive, The Historical Society and The Community Church of Douglaston. She is on the Board of Women to Women which oversees cancer survivor volunteers at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and is part of the Peer Review Congressional Funded Committee, in Washington D.C., that reviews cancer funding for the U.S. Army. She is both a scholar of the U.S. Study Center (USSC) and a Fulbright Scholar. She has a triple concentrated doctorate in Management Science, Behavioral Psychology and International Business. She is married to Edward LaGrassa and mother to Alex and Hunter both studying Engineering. “We are blessed to live in this wonderful community, and it is our responsibility to be stewards for the next 100 years”.
Marcia Tu
Marcia Tu, her husband, Scott Bernstein, and daughter, Nikki, have been Douglaston residents since 2010. Marcia grew up in Utah and Colorado and attended Vassar College and NYU Law School. She has worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse as a corporate, financial services and regulatory compliance lawyer. In addition to living in New York; Marcia and Scott lived in Bangkok and Hong Kong for six years. Their dog, Kit, enjoys taking Marcia and Scott out for daily walks.
Lidija Markes
Lidija Markes considers herself a generalist. She has a passion for digital content and past work experience in business, higher education, fundraising and development. She got her start in New York working in a Public Relations department of a large metropolitan university and for the past fifteen years she has worked a wide variety of businesses on managing their in-house accounting and general operations. Additionally, her skills include web development, database creation and management, social media and email marketing, as well as media buying, monitoring, and reporting. Lidija holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication and International Politics and has a strong business background stemming from an MBA in Accounting in progress (which she is determined to complete before she retires.) Originally from Croatia, she also lived in England and Italy prior to coming to the United States two decades ago. Lidija lives in Little Neck with her high-school sophomore daughter.
John Carpentieri
John grew up in Douglaston, living in both the Park and Manor sections. Since 2000, he has lived in the Park Section with his wife and son. Growing up he attended local public schools, PS98, JHS 67 and Cardozo High School. He received a BA in Anthropology from NYS Binghamton University. Attended NYC Baruch College for work in Finance and Accounting. His career has been in Real Estate Management since 1987, specializing in all aspects of Cooperative and Condominium Apartment building management in Manhattan. Currently with Douglas Elliman Property Management.
Andrea Licari-LaGrassa
Andrea is Professor at St. John’s University where she is also the Director of the Fashion and Lifestyle Institute. She has been instrumental in raising funds for our community for: Save the Dock Drive, The Historical Society and The Community Church of Douglaston. She is on the Board of Women to Women which oversees cancer survivor volunteers at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and is part of the Peer Review Congressional Funded Committee, in Washington D.C., that reviews cancer funding for the U.S. Army. She is both a scholar of the U.S. Study Center (USSC) and a Fulbright Scholar. She has a triple concentrated doctorate in Management Science, Behavioral Psychology and International Business. She is married to Edward LaGrassa and mother to Alex and Hunter both studying Engineering. “We are blessed to live in this wonderful community, and it is our responsibility to be stewards for the next 100 years”.
Marcia Tu
Marcia Tu, her husband, Scott Bernstein, and daughter, Nikki, have been Douglaston residents since 2010. Marcia grew up in Utah and Colorado and attended Vassar College and NYU Law School. She has worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse as a corporate, financial services and regulatory compliance lawyer. In addition to living in New York; Marcia and Scott lived in Bangkok and Hong Kong for six years. Their dog, Kit, enjoys taking Marcia and Scott out for daily walks.
Lidija Markes
Lidija Markes considers herself a generalist. She has a passion for digital content and past work experience in business, higher education, fundraising and development. She got her start in New York working in a Public Relations department of a large metropolitan university and for the past fifteen years she has worked a wide variety of businesses on managing their in-house accounting and general operations. Additionally, her skills include web development, database creation and management, social media and email marketing, as well as media buying, monitoring, and reporting. Lidija holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication and International Politics and has a strong business background stemming from an MBA in Accounting in progress (which she is determined to complete before she retires.) Originally from Croatia, she also lived in England and Italy prior to coming to the United States two decades ago. Lidija lives in Little Neck with her high-school sophomore daughter.
John Carpentieri
John grew up in Douglaston, living in both the Park and Manor sections. Since 2000, he has lived in the Park Section with his wife and son. Growing up he attended local public schools, PS98, JHS 67 and Cardozo High School. He received a BA in Anthropology from NYS Binghamton University. Attended NYC Baruch College for work in Finance and Accounting. His career has been in Real Estate Management since 1987, specializing in all aspects of Cooperative and Condominium Apartment building management in Manhattan. Currently with Douglas Elliman Property Management.
March 30, 2019
Testimony to New York City Council in support of Intro 1109
Image Courtesy NY Food Policy Council
3/30/2016
by Scott Grimm-Lyon Executive Director
My name is Scott Grimm-Lyon, I’m the Executive Director of the Douglaston Local Development Corporation, a small nonprofit that manages the Douglaston Station Plaza adjacent to the Douglaston Long Island Rail Road station, at the center of the historic commercial village of Douglaston, in northeast Queens.
Douglaston is a small, quiet, walkable railroad suburb. Like many suburban communities, our traditional downtown has suffered as big box and strip mall development offered competition for local retail. In 2010 and 2011 a group of concerned citizens formed our organization, we led an extensive community visioning process, and the community developed a plan that included restoring the plaza in our village as a means of rebuilding a sense of community identity that focused on our village.
Because of that plan, in February 2014, the Douglaston Local Development Corporation was selected as a partner of the NYC Department of Transport to create a new public space in the
Douglaston Village as part of NYC's Plaza Program. The Plaza formally opened in September 2014 and since then it has served our community of 10,000 residents, our 2000 daily LIRR commuters and has acted as a focal point for over 30 local businesses in our
Our organization manages the plaza by offering maintenance and cleaning services, taking care of plants and landscaping, and the street furniture, and by organizing over a dozen seasonal events. We do this on a shoestring budget, with only two part time staff members, and a heavy reliance on volunteer hours put in by passionate members of our community.
Our community, like our organization, is small. We have different needs than many of the plazas in larger communities, and we have a different capacity than many of the organizations that are larger than us. The current framework for managing plazas is “one size fits all,” and as a small fish in a big sea, DLDC has had to swim extra hard to keep up with the demands of paperwork required under the current conditions.
As a small nonprofit with no full time staff we rely heavily on the volunteer efforts of our board and community to manage our work; and when that work is tedious, including the process for event permitting, securing temporary commercial use authorizations, and by needing to secure different permissions from different agencies, we risk alienating good volunteers by tangling them up in hours of frustrating work, and we lose precious time that could otherwise be used to improve programming at our plaza.
Intro 1109 will help us manage our work at the scale we need. By empowering plaza partners, with a broader set of tools to effectively manage the pedestrian plazas, and by empowering a single agency to define a clear set of rules and guidelines we will be able to streamline our event planning process and better use our volunteer hours for direct service to the plaza. We wholly support giving the DOT rule-making authority, and are pleased that a set of uniform rules will be issued. The bill ensures that the plazas continue to function as successful community amenities and are managed in the context of each specific community.
As local partners, Plaza managers are committed to their neighborhood and to highlighting their unique characteristics; the new rules under Intro 1109 will provide a more flexibility for small organizations like ours to provide Placemaking services to our small communities.
The families of Douglaston use their plaza as a casual gathering space between friends, and a hub for neighbor to neighbor activities, true civic activities that are small in scale but large in impact. We ask you to support Intro 1109, because this bill is more than a solution for large Plazas like Times Square, it is a solution for neighborhood plazas too, because it gives clear, appropriate, and streamlined responsibilities to management agencies regardless of their size.
by Scott Grimm-Lyon Executive Director
My name is Scott Grimm-Lyon, I’m the Executive Director of the Douglaston Local Development Corporation, a small nonprofit that manages the Douglaston Station Plaza adjacent to the Douglaston Long Island Rail Road station, at the center of the historic commercial village of Douglaston, in northeast Queens.
Douglaston is a small, quiet, walkable railroad suburb. Like many suburban communities, our traditional downtown has suffered as big box and strip mall development offered competition for local retail. In 2010 and 2011 a group of concerned citizens formed our organization, we led an extensive community visioning process, and the community developed a plan that included restoring the plaza in our village as a means of rebuilding a sense of community identity that focused on our village.
Because of that plan, in February 2014, the Douglaston Local Development Corporation was selected as a partner of the NYC Department of Transport to create a new public space in the
Douglaston Village as part of NYC's Plaza Program. The Plaza formally opened in September 2014 and since then it has served our community of 10,000 residents, our 2000 daily LIRR commuters and has acted as a focal point for over 30 local businesses in our
Our organization manages the plaza by offering maintenance and cleaning services, taking care of plants and landscaping, and the street furniture, and by organizing over a dozen seasonal events. We do this on a shoestring budget, with only two part time staff members, and a heavy reliance on volunteer hours put in by passionate members of our community.
Our community, like our organization, is small. We have different needs than many of the plazas in larger communities, and we have a different capacity than many of the organizations that are larger than us. The current framework for managing plazas is “one size fits all,” and as a small fish in a big sea, DLDC has had to swim extra hard to keep up with the demands of paperwork required under the current conditions.
As a small nonprofit with no full time staff we rely heavily on the volunteer efforts of our board and community to manage our work; and when that work is tedious, including the process for event permitting, securing temporary commercial use authorizations, and by needing to secure different permissions from different agencies, we risk alienating good volunteers by tangling them up in hours of frustrating work, and we lose precious time that could otherwise be used to improve programming at our plaza.
Intro 1109 will help us manage our work at the scale we need. By empowering plaza partners, with a broader set of tools to effectively manage the pedestrian plazas, and by empowering a single agency to define a clear set of rules and guidelines we will be able to streamline our event planning process and better use our volunteer hours for direct service to the plaza. We wholly support giving the DOT rule-making authority, and are pleased that a set of uniform rules will be issued. The bill ensures that the plazas continue to function as successful community amenities and are managed in the context of each specific community.
As local partners, Plaza managers are committed to their neighborhood and to highlighting their unique characteristics; the new rules under Intro 1109 will provide a more flexibility for small organizations like ours to provide Placemaking services to our small communities.
The families of Douglaston use their plaza as a casual gathering space between friends, and a hub for neighbor to neighbor activities, true civic activities that are small in scale but large in impact. We ask you to support Intro 1109, because this bill is more than a solution for large Plazas like Times Square, it is a solution for neighborhood plazas too, because it gives clear, appropriate, and streamlined responsibilities to management agencies regardless of their size.
March 24, 2019 |
Douglaston LDC Hires New Director
March 24th 2016 Douglaston, Queens. —Following upon their successful community revitalization efforts, including the development of the Douglaston Station Plaza, The Douglaston Local Development Corporation (DLDC) has hired their first Executive Director; Scott Grimm-Lyon. A trained urban planner, Grimm-Lyon has more than 8 years of experience in community organizing and economic development, he’s an entrepreneur who started his own consulting firm in 2011 where he has worked with small businesses in Western Queens, Central Brooklyn, and on Long Island. He has a Masters degree in City and Regional Planning from Pratt, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.
“Scott’s a great fit for our efforts in Douglaston, and will really help us to further implement the revitalization strategy established by the whole Douglaston community”, said Victor Dadras, member of the DLDC board. “He understands the technical and government side of the work, but more importantly he understands how to engage the residents and local businesses in a way that will help create a more vibrant community.”
The DLDC is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2010 by Douglaston residents, merchants and other stakeholders to preserve and protect the unique historical and aesthetic qualities of the Douglaston Village commercial district.
The DLDC led a comprehensive community planning effort in 2010-2012 and developed a preservation and revitalization Strategic Action plan for the Douglaston Village area, including the new Plaza at the Douglaston Parkway and 235th Street areas by inviting community members to participate in a visioning process. “I want what the community wants,” said Grimm-Lyon “to see the historic commercial areas become the heart of the community. We’ve done great work hosting events like Plaza Movie Nights and Pets on the Plaza and we’re going to build on that success. We want to rebuild and preserve the community character that has made Douglaston a truly unique place to live, work, shop, and gather with your neighbors.”
You can volunteer for the DLDC and learn more about the work of the Douglaston Local Development Corporation by visiting their website at www.dougldc.org.
“Scott’s a great fit for our efforts in Douglaston, and will really help us to further implement the revitalization strategy established by the whole Douglaston community”, said Victor Dadras, member of the DLDC board. “He understands the technical and government side of the work, but more importantly he understands how to engage the residents and local businesses in a way that will help create a more vibrant community.”
The DLDC is a not-for-profit organization formed in 2010 by Douglaston residents, merchants and other stakeholders to preserve and protect the unique historical and aesthetic qualities of the Douglaston Village commercial district.
The DLDC led a comprehensive community planning effort in 2010-2012 and developed a preservation and revitalization Strategic Action plan for the Douglaston Village area, including the new Plaza at the Douglaston Parkway and 235th Street areas by inviting community members to participate in a visioning process. “I want what the community wants,” said Grimm-Lyon “to see the historic commercial areas become the heart of the community. We’ve done great work hosting events like Plaza Movie Nights and Pets on the Plaza and we’re going to build on that success. We want to rebuild and preserve the community character that has made Douglaston a truly unique place to live, work, shop, and gather with your neighbors.”
You can volunteer for the DLDC and learn more about the work of the Douglaston Local Development Corporation by visiting their website at www.dougldc.org.
