Three Sundays Left: What Forest Hills Is Actually Doing With a Car-Free Austin Street

Austin Street closes to cars twice this weekend, and the two closures have almost nothing to do with each other. Saturday belongs to the Austin Street Fall Festival, a one-day vendor fair put on by TKS Sweet Shop with the usual mix of crafts, food, and live music. Sunday is different. Sunday is the second of four Sunday Open Streets, a pilot program that took five years of petitioning, a rejected application, and one contested trial run to get onto the calendar at all.

If you live near Austin Street, you have probably already noticed which one people are talking about. The festival is a nice afternoon. The Open Street is an argument that has been running since 2019, and it still has not been settled.

Five Years to Get a Yes

The push to close part of Austin Street to traffic started with Pedro Rodriguez, a Forest Hills resident who moved from Astoria in 2019 and began circulating a petition to make the block more pedestrian-friendly. By March 2023 it had collected 277 handwritten signatures and 390 more online. That same year, the group he helped found, Neighbors for a Safer Austin Street, asked the city's Department of Transportation for a formal safety study of the corridor. The study never happened.

So the group applied directly to the city's Open Streets program for a weekend closure running from July through Halloween. The city said no. What it granted instead was a single day, a one-time permit that became "Austin Day" on September 20, 2025, closing the block between 71st Avenue and 71st Road to cars for a few hours.

That one day did not resolve anything, but it produced enough data and enough goodwill that the group came back this year with a bigger ask, and this time the answer was yes. The current pilot runs every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., from August 30 through September 20, on the same stretch between 71st Avenue and 71st Road. It is organized by the nonprofit Open Plans in partnership with Neighbors for a Safer Austin Street, four Sundays instead of one day, the largest test the block has gotten since the petition started.

What Actually Fills the Street

The programming has been built for families more than for foot traffic alone. On the opening Sunday, August 30, the FDNY ran fire safety education and handed out coloring books from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Forest Hills Green Team and Central Queens Against Hate hosted a youth event from 2 to 4 p.m., a back-to-school supplies giveaway started at 2 p.m., and Street Lab set up an interactive building station called BUILD alongside a Kids Corner. Every week since, the event has kept offering public seating, games, and community resources through the participating local businesses along the block.

Councilmember Lynn Schulman, who helped organize the effort, put it plainly after an earlier trial: kids finally have a space where they can run around while their parents are nearby, and the city is watching to see how the pilot goes before deciding what happens next.

Two Forest Hills residents, Jian Tan and Sophie Nicolich-Henkin, made a point during last year's debate that is worth holding onto. They said they already avoid driving on Austin Street on weekends because of the traffic, so an open street costs them nothing they were using anyway. Tan added a sharper observation: the Sunday crowd Austin Street organizers are hoping to build already exists three blocks away, at the Forest Hills Greenmarket at 70th Avenue and Queens Boulevard. If the open street wants to capture some of that same energy, he argued, it needs to give people something to do in the space, not just an empty road.

The Corridor Was Already Changing

Whatever the pilot proves or fails to prove about foot traffic, the retail mix along Austin Street has been shifting on its own timeline. In the year or so before this pilot began, the corridor picked up Azal Coffee, a Yemeni coffee shop serving pistachio lattes and Adeni tea, and a second Queens location for Moka and Co, another Yemeni coffee and tea spot. Forest Hills Pizzeria opened with classic and specialty pies, and sweetgreen brought its salads and bowls to the neighborhood too.

None of that depended on the street being closed to cars. It happened well before the current round of Sunday closures existed, which is worth remembering the next time a headline tries to credit or blame a single traffic decision for a neighborhood's dining scene. Austin Street was drawing new cafes and restaurants long before this pilot gave anyone a reason to write about it.

There is a longer version of this story too. Austin Street has been Forest Hills' commercial spine since the 1940s, when the original houses along the stretch from Yellowstone Boulevard to Ascan Avenue were torn down for storefronts. The corridor is also getting a Citi Bike expansion, with two to four new stations planned for the street by December 2026. The street is changing in more ways than the Sunday closures alone would suggest.

The Opposition Is Real, and It Has Not Gone Away

Not everyone on the block wants any of this. Leslie Brown, president of the Forest Hills Chamber of Commerce, has said flatly that most merchants on the stretch oppose the closures. Her argument is about what the street is for. Austin Street is the neighborhood's business district, she has said, not a park, and she has cited her own group's safety study to push back on the idea that the corridor has a pedestrian safety problem in the first place.

State Senator Joe Addabbo Jr. wrote to Community Board 6 in June 2025 opposing a longer-term street closure, citing disruption to businesses and the loss of parking spots. He has said occasional closures for scheduled events are fine, since those already happen throughout the year, but a recurring closure is a different commitment.

Not every board member agrees with the Chamber. CB6 member Peter Beadle has said a permanent open street on the stretch would work well, arguing that without it, pedestrians already crowded onto the sidewalk anyway. Rodriguez has said his group has a petition of support signed by at least 20 local businesses. Whether that number moves the Chamber's position is still an open question.

Three Sundays Left

The current pilot ends September 20, and what happens after that has not been announced. It is worth remembering how modest the ask was the last time anyone spoke publicly about the future of this program. After Austin Day wrapped in September 2025, Rodriguez said he hoped the group could reapply for something as small as a single day the following year. Instead, 2026 brought four consecutive Sundays, a bigger commitment from the city than organizers had asked for out loud. Schulman's comments from that same period leaned into the uncertainty on purpose: everyone involved wanted to see how a longer trial went before anyone committed to something permanent. Now that trial is almost over, and the same question is back on the table with better evidence behind it.

So if you have not walked Austin Street on a car-free Sunday yet, the window is short. Two Sundays remain after this one, September 13 and September 20, both from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. between 71st Avenue and 71st Road. Whether you come back for the FDNY table, the Kids Corner, a Yemeni coffee, or just to see what the block feels like without traffic, you are watching a five-year argument play out in real time, one Sunday at a time.

Forest Hills has spent this year deciding, block by block and Sunday by Sunday, what its main street should feel like. That kind of decision tends to shape a neighborhood long after the specific festival dates are forgotten. Binnie Sen has spent more than two decades paying attention to exactly these kinds of shifts across Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, the quiet changes that eventually show up in how a block lives, not just in what it sells for. Whenever you are ready to talk about what a neighborhood like this actually means for your next move, let's talk about your next move.