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Pols assure that Parkway Hospital won't become a detention center

Rep. Anthony Weiner

Queens residents were up in arms last week after an erroneous report suggested that the Parkway Hospital, a shuttered health facility at 113th Street and 71st Avenue in Forest Hills, would be reopening as a detention center. Rep. Anthony Weiner, who represents Brooklyn and Queens, along with State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky and Assembly members Andrew Hevesi and Karen Koslowitz, held a press conference outside the hospital yesterday in order to assuage fears that the facility, which closed last year after a "state recommendation," according to the New York Times, would be converted into a prison. The kerfluffle erupted after both the Queens Courier and the Queens Chronicle quoted an Oct. 15 deposition, in which the building's court-appointed mortgage receiver said: "aside from a health care facility, there would be few viable uses for the building such as a low-security correctional or detention center or a halfway house." Last week a federal judge dismissed an early-stage injunction to reopen the facility. [NYT]