QUEENS, N.Y. (PIX11) — The two-day Head in the Clouds music festival is coming to New York, but not without controversy.
Two different groups of residents in Forest Hills are concerned about the festival and all the others that are expected to take place at Forest Hills stadium in the next three months.
“They block off the street and Uber drivers coming down the driveways,” Jean Hahn, a Forest Hills resident, told PIX11 News. “You get a lot of random people, some of them smoking pot.”
To Hahn, the Forest Hills Stadium concert season is a nightmare.
She says her 12-year-old daughter can’t do her homework because of the loud music, which also disrupts her husband‘s sleep. The Clyde Street resident joined the group Concerned Citizens of Forest Hills, a nonprofit looking for what they call “reasonable restrictions.”
“It’s not appropriate that people’s houses are shaking. It’s not appropriate that people can’t get their children to sleep,” Andy Court, the founder of Concerned Citizens of Forest Hills, told PIX11 News. “It’s not appropriate that these concerts go past 10 p.m., there are also trash and traffic problems,” he added.
Another group, Forest Hills Gardens Corporation is in court with the Forest Hills Stadium after the residents’ group threatened to block pedestrian access from the Long Island Railroad to the entrance of the stadium, which is on land owned by the West Side Tennis Club.
The Forest Hills Gardens group wants concertgoers to walk on Yellowstone Boulevard to get to the concerts instead of using the much closer Burns Street entrance.
“If you don’t want to live in a range of a stadium that’s been here for a century, there’s nothing we can really do about that,” Mike Luba, the president of Forest Hills Stadium, told PIX11 News. “And honestly we don’t close the streets. That’s decided by the NYPD and counterterrorism.”
And while some residents clearly are upset by the thought of 13,000 concertgoers attending 28 concerts this season, other Forest Hills Gardens residents are looking forward to the upcoming Head in the Clouds festival.
“It brings the community together. It brings energy and brings my friends in from Manhattan,” Loc Vukhac, a Forest Hills Gardens resident, told PIX11 News. “It becomes a communal place.”
After this weekend’s festival of Head in the Clouds, a judge will look for a legal resolution on how concertgoers and Forest Hills neighbors can coexist peacefully over the summer concert months.
