The morning's longest fight wasn't over hundreds of apartments. It was over two-foot tables on a Greenwich Village sidewalk. Joseph Castellano, who runs Denino's Pizzeria and Tavern, told the subcommittee he was summoned just to prove his cafe would meet ADA rules, six outdoor tables, two chairs each. Council Member Harvey Epstein pressed him: how does a wheelchair user clear a 36-inch turn radius past your tables? Castellano insisted the sidewalk runs twelve feet wide, leaving a ten-foot clear path, and that restaurants up and down MacDougal already operate the same footprint. Epstein asked him to put it in writing. Castellano agreed. The item was heard and laid over.
The bigger story sat in Flushing. At 147-14 Northern Boulevard, in Council Member Sandra Ung's district, applicant representative Eric Polatnik laid out a rezoning from R5 to R7X that would replace a one-story strip of stores with two mixed-use buildings, about 389 apartments, roughly 97 of them permanently affordable under MIH Option 1 at 25 percent. Polatnik called the block tremendously underzoned, taller apartment houses already sit behind it on the same street, so the proposal corrects what he framed as backwards zoning. The plan packs in 334,000 square feet, with about 35,000 for ground-floor retail and 9,000 to 12,000 for the Korean American Family Service Center, a nonprofit serving over 3,000 people a year, including immigrant survivors of gender-based violence, that has outgrown two separate sites.
CB7 and the Queens Borough President had pushed back on too many studios. Polatnik said the team already ran a preliminary count bringing two-bedrooms up to 122 by cutting studios and one-bedrooms, and would keep tailoring. Parking was the neighborhood's other worry. Terrence Park, a 40-year member of the First United Methodist Church of Flushing a block away, said the developers added 155 spaces to reach 280, more than zoning requires, and that won his support. 32BJ and Local 79 backed the project on jobs and wages.
Both public hearings closed with the items laid over, the standard subcommittee pause before a vote. The Northern Boulevard team still owes a final unit count, and Castellano owes a letter. Whether the two-foot tables or the 97 apartments move first now rests with the full Land Use Committee.