Fake Bomb at LGA Leads to Three Hour Evacuation

A Greenwich Village man brought before Queens Criminal Judge Lenora Gerald for arraignment Saturday evening has been ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he is fit to stand trial.

Scott McGann, 32, is accused of causing a bomb scare at LaGuardia Airport early on Saturday morning resulting in the evacuation of thousands of early morning travelers for more than three hours. Flights were disrupted and car and pedestrian traffic at the airport built up and clogged all access roads. Would-be fliers used their cell phones to contact friends and family, advising of delays. Others just resigned themselves to the wait, stretching out on grass beds or sidewalks.

Concourse C which serves United, United Express and American Eagle, stayed closed while investigators opened a criminal investigation at the scene.

An outline of charges state that when McGann appeared at a security checkpoint at LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B around 4:50 a.m. on Saturday morning, a United Airlines ticket agent noticed he was wearing a back pack and sweating profusely. Law enforcement officials say that he also appeared to be intoxicated.

When McGann was asked for identification, but he refused to answer questions. While talking, the agent was made aware that a suspicious package was attached to the bottom of McGann’s backpack.

Realizing what was happening, McGann allegedly reached for and grabbed what appeared to be a trigger device with a red button attached to a wire. He pressed the red button until a Port Authority police officer grabbed his hand and tackled him, removing the trigger device and grabbing the package attached to the backpack. According to published reports, the officer felt what he believed to be sticks of dynamite.

The NYPD bomb squad arrived at the scene and searched McGann’s bag with Port Authority Police. The device was actually a mock bomb made from cylinders and batteries wrapped together and taped up.

According to the boarding pass in his possession, McGann was slated to fly to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport before connecting to flights that would eventually take him to Oakland, California.

Although the main terminal was reopened shortly before 9 a.m. delays continued throughout the day. Travelers tried to get back to their terminals, many forced to carry their own bags, but were met with extended flight delays; some were rescheduled for next day flights or left to deal with stand-by status.

Two months ago, McGann was arrested following a bizarre incident. He entered the criminal courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan and grabbed a stack of papers from a lawyer, attempting then to run from the building. He also has a 1992 arrest for bringing a gun into a high school. He moved to New York in 2006 and has been arrested several times for quality of life crimes including unauthorized vending.

DA Richard Brown said, “The defendant is clearly a very troubled young man. As a result, the Court has directed that he be examined to determine whether he has the capacity to understand the proceedings against him and assist in his defense. Pending the results of said examination, the defendant is being held without bail. His next court date is August 6, 2009.”

If convicted, McGann could face up to seven years in prison.

The Forum Newsgroup/photos by CHARLES ECKERT

Forest Hills: Now Boarding

By Steve Tiszenkel

One of the very best parts of living in Central Queens is leaving. Oh, don’t look so offended — regular readers of this column know very well that I love it here. It’s just that excellent access to a wide variety of transportation options makes our area a better place than most to vacate, whether by bus, car, subway or commuter train. And the best way to leave is by air.

Forest Hills and Kew Gardens have long been inviting to the aviation inclined purely by an accident of geography: We’re more or less halfway between LaGuardia and JFK. For those of us who take an occasional flight, this nearly makes up for our near-total inability to take advantage of anything flying in or out of Newark. (I’ve repeatedly sworn off that other airport after one too many taxi rides approaching $100, though cheap fares keep luring me back in.) It’s no wonder that this week flight attendant Heather Poole, who lives here, recommended Forest Hills to readers of the travel blog Gadling as a great destination for travelers forced to deal with a moderate layover in New York.

I’m still not sure how this happened, but the last time I flew into LaGuardia, about 25 minutes elapsed between the time the plane’s wheels hit the runway and the moment my cab pulled up to the front of my building. And that time includes the few minutes the driver took to miss a couple of turns despite my repeated instructions. This will likely remain one of the most awe-inspiring travel experiences of my life for years to come.

But I don’t fly very often. I’d do it every week if I could — Lisbon, here I come! — but I still have a job and tickets are still expensive, even if airlines finally have been able to lower prices by charging absurd amounts to check baggage. The real beneficiaries of our comfortable place nestled in the middle of the Borough of Airports are the pilots, flight attendants and airport personnel who have long made the area home and inspired one of the better nicknames for a New York neighborhood, Crew Gardens.

Don’t know many of them personally? Well, they’re not around much. But they’re an unmistakable presence, rushing down Queens Boulevard at a professional gait with their little rolling bags and kicking back at some of the divier bars around. And often they fly under the radar—Forest Hills and Kew Gardens crash pads are the stuff of legend. At a rotating series of addresses in a situation of questionable legality, flight attendants go to the mattresses between quick flights to Dover and Dubuque. In my own building, the story has it, a doctor on the ground floor used to rent his office to a group of them to use during off hours. You don’t know they’re there—you’re not supposed to — but there they are. What, would you rather walk by a crack den on your way to Key Food?

With all this history and convenience, the Forest Hills-Kew Gardens border was the perfect location for a headquarters for JetBlue, easily the neighborhood’s marquee corporation—though one that seems to be, as I complained in this space not long ago, in a big hurry to leave town. But maybe we don’t need them. If just a few readers take Poole’s online advice to do “what flight attendants do” and pay us a quick visit, more will surely follow, and business might pick up around here. It shouldn’t matter whether you work for an airline or are just passing through—Forest Hills is the only way to fly.

The writer is the host of the Website queenscentral.com. Log on to read more about Forest Hills and surrounding neighborhoods.

Forest Hills: A Sleeping Giant

By Steve Tiszenkel

You may or may not have heard about this, but New York-based businesses are not doing so well these days. There was this minor to-do last week about some $700-billion bailout, and such financial-sector luminaries as AIG and Merrill Lynch—both of which are headquartered right here in the Capital of the World—were in serious danger of, well, no longer existing. Luckily, our lame-duck president's mind-blowingly spendy plan promises to patch things up while conveniently leaving the next administration to sort out where all the money went.

But you wouldn't know it in Forest Hills. Not only does our inconvenient location in relation to the Financial District guarantee that the thousands upon thousands of workers who will inevitably lose their jobs disproportionately don't live here, but hey, business is booming. According to a recent report by the Center for an Urban Future publicized by The Daily News, Queens had the largest share of job growth in New York City in the past 10 years, and Forest Hills racked up the biggest numerical increase in Queens, adding almost 8,000 jobs between 1997 and 2007. Long Island City, home to a couple gleaming new office towers completed in that time frame, only added about 5,000.

As residents of Forest Hills, most of us leave in the morning, come home at night, and spend the weekends taking care of chores in the neighborhood, waving at neighbors as we go. This other Forest Hills is a mysterious place—a different world with a different population that inhabits our streets when we leave and vacates when we return. Most of us probably don't even know they're here. Who are these people? Where do they work?

“I would guess medical and banks,” speculates popular local blogger Forest Hills 72, and he's got a point. Banks have descended on Forest Hills in recent years like a plague of green locusts, and most of them have a substantial staff. And as the population ages, new medical offices are always opening.

But even a bank occupying every other storefront on Continental Avenue can't explain all that job growth. No one industry could be responsible for 8,000 new jobs in our little neighborhood in the middle of Queens. And bank branches are essentially just small businesses, albeit small businesses owned and operated by huge, monolithic corporations.

It's more likely that the Forest Hills boom is tied to companies such as JetBlue, an airline that didn't even exist when the Center for an Urban Future report's range begins in 1997 but now employs nearly 10,000, with the Forest Hills Tower on the west side of Union Turnpike as its headquarters. Located approximately halfway be-
tween JFK and LaGuardia airports, Forest Hills is an ideal place for an airline to set up shop. Really, it's a great place for any company to set up shop—a stone's throw from America's biggest financial districts but situated firmly in lower-key Queens, with its far-lower rents, great public transportation and easy access by car to Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island and Westchester.

The reasons people want to work in Forest Hills aren't much different from some of the reasons people want to live in Forest Hills, and the way Forest Hills flies under the radar as a dynamic business community isn't much different from its underrated status as a hot residential neighborhood. We might not get noticed on either front, but fanfare doesn't always beget success. Just ask the most glamorous companies in the world's most prominent financial capital.

The writer, Steve Tiszenkel is the host of the Website, Queens Central. Log on to www.queenscentral.com to read more about Forest Hills and surrounding neighborhoods.