By Celia Bernhardt | cbernhardt@queensledger.com

“You go to some centers, it’s either bingo all day long or whatever. We’re not like that here,” member Donna Johnson says of Allen AME’s senior center on Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park.

On a Monday morning at the center, music from a radio spills out into the hallway. While seniors play pool in one room, they follow along with an exercise video in another. Members say that puzzles, jewelry making, sewing, and hot meals are just a few of the other benefits they can rely on at the center. 

“We like to keep active. Most of the people here are retired people — you worked all your life, you want to come out and socialize with other people,” Johnson says. 

But in recent months, at least 10 seniors in the lively community have been noticeably missing. Johnson says these members had been reliant on rides from Cathay, a transportation provider that abruptly reduced its services two months ago. 

A quiet change in a contract and an apparent breakdown in communication has left approximately 100 seniors without rides to and from Older Adult Centers in Southeast Queens. Now, seniors and staff alike say they’re worried that those who can no longer make it to the centers could suffer cognitive and physical decline. 

“Some people were getting early signs of dementia,” Veronica Ralph-Munro, a member the Rockaway Boulevard center, said. “That’s why people who knew them wanted them to come out…they’re gonna decline more because they’re stuck in a house.”

A bullet point and budget shortfall 

Cathay Express Transportation, contracted by the city’s Department for the Aging, announced a sudden reduction in the services at the end of last year for senior centers including Allen AME and Alpha Phi Alpha. While rides to and from medical appointments and errands are still available through the provider, trips between senior centers and homes — which scores of seniors had relied on — are not. 

THE CITY reported last Thursday that the change can be attributed in part to a bullet point in an addendum to a request for proposal. In previous years, regular rides between centers and seniors’ homes were a standard duty for transportation contractors assigned to serve OACs in a given region. The addendum, however, stated that such rides were “not the intent” of the program. “Standalone” rides to medical appointments and errands, or group day trips for senior centers, were to be the focus. 

Those were the terms of a service that Cathay began providing in July 2023. But for the first six months of the contract, things seemed to be operating as they always had for Allen AME and Alpha Phi Alpha. 

Alpha Phi Alpha Director Melissa Marcus said that Cathay sent flyers detailing their services at the beginning of the term. The flyers didn’t mention home-to-center transport one way or another, citing only standalone rides. Still, she said, Cathay didn’t hesitate to offer those rides when asked. 

“We called them about doing pickups…Didn’t have a problem,” Marcus said. “Different days, different times, they were very good with scheduling everything.”

Three months into the contract, Cathay requested that the list of Alphi Phi Alpha seniors receiving daily rides be reduced from 40 to 20, and that seniors reimburse Cathay for rides they had taken over the previous three months. Marcus said she complied with the first request, but flatly refused the latter, offering to brainstorm other solutions with Cathay. 

The next indication that something had gone wrong was the massive service reduction itself. 

Marcus said she received three phone calls in the course of one Friday afternoon before Christmas: the first stating that home-to-center services were ending, the second stating that the first call had been a misunderstanding, and the third reiterating the message of the first call. 

Executive Director of Allen AME Community Non-Profit Programs Donna Atmore-Dolly, meanwhile, received an email on January 5 titled “Dept. of Aging Budget Constraints.” 

“We regret to inform you that due to budgetary constraints imposed by the Department of Aging, we are currently experiencing limitations in accommodating trips for our senior members,” the email read. “Despite our meticulous planning to ensure adequate funding throughout the year, we have unfortunately reached the end of our budget.”

Cathay did not respond to requests for comment from the Queens Ledger.  

DFTA representative Gregory Rose, in an email to the Queens Ledger, said that the amount of money in Cathay’s rate-based contract had been running out. “To make sure they could still provide the service as stated in the RFP, we discouraged use of travel to and from older adult facilities through Cathay and encouraged them to use alternative modes of transportation,” Rose wrote. 

“I just stay in my house” 

Johnson, Ralph-Munro, and multiple others agreed that at least 10 members had stopped coming in due to the lack of transportation. Still more have reduced the number of days per week they come in. 

“We miss their company. They’re important when we’re having discussions,” Ralph-Munro said.  

Program Manager Sabrina Marson agreed that the center’s numbers are lower because of the change, adding that the cold weather worsens matters for seniors facing the prospect of waiting outside for less-reliable transit options like city buses. 

Marcus reported similar numbers, estimating that 10 seniors at Alpha Phi Alpha have stopped showing up altogether. She shares the concerns of Allen AME seniors about mental decline. 

“I get a lot of seniors who tell me, ‘Thank you for providing these services because it’s helping me live longer,’” Marcus said. “So you kind of think when they’re not having the services, they’re deteriorating.”

The situation reminds Rockaway Boulevard member Evonne Valere of dark times in recent years. She attributes the death of her peers during the Covid-19 lockdown to the social isolation of staying at home. 

“So many people died during the pandemic because we couldn’t come out,” Valere said. 

Patricia Thomas has had a particularly difficult time getting to the Rockaway Boulevard center. She lives in Rosedale, far away from most other members, and often has to use Access-a-Ride — or, as she calls it, ‘stress-a-ride.’ On Monday morning, Thomas said, she waited an additional 20 minutes for a van to arrive after being told over the phone it would pick her up by 8:05. Previous commutes have been worse; Thomas says she was once driven to Far Rockaway after asking to go to the center.

“I get to the point when I get aggravated I just stay in my house,” Thomas said. 

What’s left

Both seniors and staff at Rockaway Boulevard said on Monday that they had not been aware that they were still able to request standalone rides — for group shopping trips from the center, doctor’s appointments, errands, and more — from Cathay. 

“No one had told us that yet, to be honest with you. This is my first time hearing that,” Marson, who began working at the center in January after Cathay’s service reduction, said. 

Meanwhile, Marcus reported receiving multiple calls from Cathay in the past two weeks reminding her that such rides were available. 

While standalone rides could be helpful, Marson says, the recurring daily rides to and from centers are the ones that really count. 

“It’s the daily ones that cost them more money,” she said. “You want to socialize with your friends, you want to come to the center and have fun, but you can’t come all the time because you can’t afford it.”

Members at Rockaway Boulevard agreed that even Access-a-Ride’s cost could add up to be a burden on seniors living on a fixed income. 

“Hopefully we can get our transportation, because it’s very important for us,” Rockaway Boulevard member Shirley Phillips said. “We need transportation. We need to come in and communicate with other seniors.” 

By Celia Bernhardt | cbernhardt@queensledger.com

Approximately 80 protesters gathered outside the Wyndham Hotel at 61-18 93rd St. on Feb. 18 to rally against the conversion of the hotel to a men’s homeless shelter. Two weeks earlier, on Feb. 4, a crowd came out to protest the same issue. 

The hotel sits just around the corner from where the Long Island Expressway and Queens Boulevard cross. 

Speeches by Queens residents and political figures at the most recent rally were punctuated by chants of “No more shelters!” Speakers stood in the back of a pickup truck in front of a backdrop of protest signs pasted to the hotel’s wall, one rally leader waving a large American flag. 

The rally was emceed by District Leader Hiram Monserrate, former city council member and state senator. Monserrate was expelled from the Senate in 2010 after being charged with assault, and later served 21 months in federal prison for a separate case of fraud. The East Elmhurst Corona Alliance hosted the event, along Rego Park United — an ad-hoc group of local residents collaborating with Monserrate and the Alliance, according to Rego Park resident and speaker at the rally Peter Kefalas.

A Rego Park resident named Stephanie who introduced herself as “Sunshine” said to the crowd that the shelter would be a disaster. 

“They claim they care. They do not. They are just dumping these homeless people here, there, and everywhere,” she said to the crowd. “They are profiting from these people’s trauma.”

Sheryl Fetik, a Rego Park resident and representative of Queens Community & Civic Alliance, urged protesters to sign online petitions against the shelter and talked about possible next steps while addressing the crowd.

“We may very well need to hire a lawyer and go to court,” Fetik said. “We may need to raise money to go to court.”

Community Board 6, which represents Rego Park, was first informed by the city’s Department of Social Services about the shelter conversion in October 2023. After communicating back and forth about the issue, DSS made the decision official at a Jan. 10 CB6 meeting. 

Although the shelter was originally set to open in March, Beers-Dimitriadis recently received word that that date has been pushed back to this coming May. 

“I’m always making it clear that the Board had no vote in this matter,” CB6 Chair Heather Beers-Dimitriadis said. “We have a lot of people who seem to think that we did. We have a lot of people who seem to think that we are fully supportive of the shelter. We are supportive of the goals of the shelter, and we are equally supportive of the need for this community to live its life uninterrupted, in a very safe fashion. And we really hope that the two can happen at the same time.”

Not everyone is convinced. 

“There’s two schools in the neighborhood. There’s shopping, there’s communities, there’s businesses. We can’t allow this. And nobody asked us,” Kefalas said. Protesters also emphasized the hotel’s proximity to Lost Battalion Hall, a recreation center which is currently closed for renovations. 

Apple Maps marks P.S. 139 as a half-mile walk from the Wyndham hotel, and P.S. 206 as a 0.4 mile walk. 

Community District 6 has no other homeless shelters, by the DSS’s standards. But there is another shelter set to open across the road from Wyndham, housed near the Rego Park Post Office. Operated by WestHab, the facility will include transitional housing specifically for family units, not single men. 

“We’ll be rallying against that one too,” Kefalas said. 

Beers-Dimitriadis said that CB6 was surprised to find out that WestHab’s facility did not fulfill the district’s obligation to DSS to house at least one homeless shelter. The primary difference that she understands between that facility and Wyndham is the populations the two locations serve. 

“I think to the public, it is a distinction without a difference,” she said. “Their goals are the same.”

Additional distinctions are that the transitional housing facility will have apartment-style accommodations, while the Wyndham shelter will use the hotel’s existing structure, mostly consisting of rooms with two beds.  

In lieu of a vote on Wyndham — community boards have no veto power on the matter of shelters — CB6 passed a resolution on Feb. 7 detailing a list of considerations it wants the city to take when opening the shelter. Those include a request that the two shelters-to-be share one Community Advisory Board, rather than operate separate ones, to ensure more thorough oversight of their combined presence in the neighborhood.

Dao Yin, a Flushing resident and current Democratic candidate for the state assembly who previously ran unsuccessful campaigns for Queens Borough President in 2020 and City Council in 2021, was among the speakers on Feb. 18.  

“No more shelters in Queens, in Brooklyn, in Bronx, in Staten Island, in Manhattan. No more shelters in this city,” Yin said. 

Chants of “Close the borders!” rang out after the speeches came to a close. 

Monserrate told the Queens Ledger that Yin’s disapproval of all additional shelters in the city was not the group’s official sentiment. 

“There’s a need for shelters,” Monserrate said. “What’s happening right now is an abuse and an oversaturation in this part of Queens. That’s our major issue: the oversaturation, one. And two, the homeless men. We don’t know who they are. A lot of them are formerly incarcerated.” 

While Wyndham will be the sole DSS-recognized homeless shelter in Community District 6, it is just across the Expressway from CD3, which houses East Elmhurst, Corona, Jackson Heights, and Elmhurst. Monserrate said that the area between Queens Boulevard and LaGuardia Airport, which includes CD3, currently has 15 shelters; the Queens Ledger could not independently verify that number. 

“It’s just saturated,” Kefalas said. “That’s why you’re seeing people coming from Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, Corona, LeFrak City, because they know we’re right on the border here where these neighborhoods literally interlock. And they know. We all shop at the same [shops] around here, we all eat, we use the same transportation. We’re intertwined. They know what’s going to happen. That’s why people are coming here even as far away as Brooklyn to stand with us to stop this.”

Beers-Dimitriadis said that a significant portion of protesters seemed to come from outside of Rego Park. 

“There are people who have come into our community from East Elmhurst and Corona, that don’t live here, that I think are here because they have genuine concerns with how decisions are made about shelters. I get it. But they don’t represent Rego Park/Forest Hills,” she said.

Beers-Dimitriadis said her read on the Rego Park/Forest Hills community is that it’s split into thirds on the issue. 

“One third has no idea it’s even happening. No matter how hard we’ve tried to reach out, no matter how many articles have been written in the paper, 10,000 posts on Facebook,” Beers-Dimitriadis said. Another third, she estimates, is supportive of it, and the remaining third is against it.  

“Our message is clear to the city of New York. We are sick of you dumping shelter after shelter,” Monserrate said. “Our city tax dollars are paying for it. And then no one’s even talking to us, the people. But today, the people are united.”