Below are photos of some of the remaining woods in the storied but deeply threatened "Grace Forest" in North Hills, LI.

      Only about 60 acres of the larger "Oak-Tulip" forest or its "successional" re-growth remains: about thirty-five acres owned by NY state on the east side, and twenty-six acres owned by developers on the western side. In between are three developments that wreched the heart of the forest with the blessing of the Village of North Hills, which overturned a conservation easement in the early 2000's.

      (The original forest has of course been sliced and paved over, and now exists only between the Long Island Expressway (LIE) and the Northern State State Parkway, running for about a mile east from New Hyde Park Rd. or west from Shelter Rock Rd.)

      Those 26 acres on the eastern side are now slated to be entirely bulldozed by two already-approved real estate ventures: an RXR/Scott Rechler 10-building apartment 'estate', and an X-Cell/Hess Realty two-building office complex surrounded by parking lots. The projects will kill all the wildlife on the sites, which is said by a voluminous environmental review performed by RXR to include numerous species of small mammals, reptiles and amphibians, as well as the beautiful trees and vegetation pictured below.

      The projects are being opposed by an environmental coalition consisting of the Sierra Club LI Group, the Green Party of Nassau County, certified arborist Richard Oberlander of Nassau-Suffolk Tree Service, president of Long Island Orchestrating for Nature (LION) John DiLeonardo, and activist Richard Brummel. we welcome your help -- Call Richard Brummel at (516) 669-1741. Thank you.