Sanitation Department Floats Plans To Move 21st Street Garage

ASTORIA, QUEENS — The Department of Sanitation is seeking city approval to relocate a garage from its longtime home on 21st Street near the Ravenswood Houses to an industrial area of Astoria.

Department of Sanitation officials say the garage is dilapidated and overcrowded, and that redoing the facility would be nothing more than a short-term fix.

Officials instead want to spend $131 million to relocate the garage operations, plus a nearby salt storage shed on Vernon Boulevard, to Luyster Creek at the north end of Astoria, where the agency already stores about two dozen garbage trucks that don't fit elsewhere.

The new site, at 31-11 20th Ave., would be further from residential areas and would have no significant effects on traffic, noise and air quality, according to a Department of Sanitation presentation on the proposal.

Queens Community Board 1 voted Tuesday to approve the relocation. The proposal now heads to the Queens borough president's office for a review, then to the City Planning Commission.

The agency now crams 144 employees, 29 garbage trucks and a handful of pressure washers and salt spreaders into the one-story garage.

Because of space constraints at the 37,000-square-foot facility, employees park many of those trucks on the street.

In 2014, an inspection by the city's Department of Design and Construction found the garage also had major structural issues, including cracked walls.

The agency also wants to move its salt shed at 43rd Avenue and Vernon Boulevard, where bulkhead repair work by Silvercup Studios will force the agency out within the next two years, the presentation says.

The Luyster Creek site, where the Department of Sanitation already leases an acre of space, would span nearly 10 acres of empty land near a ConEdison power plant.

Sanitation trucks would use 19th Avenue to enter and exit the new facility, according to the agency.

The department hopes to secure final approval by August 2020.