Belmont Fair not coming back this year

The Belmont Fair, a yearly ritual that many Elmont residents say is making their neighborhood unsafe, will not happen this April.

The fair, which was timed every year to coincide with the opening of Belmont Park, has been a point of contention for many local leaders who said that it attracted more Queens residents than people from Elmont, and also was a center of gang-related activity. Their fears came to a head last year after a group of Queens youth were arrested for perpetrating a drive-by shooting which resulted from a fight that started on Belmont grounds.

“I’m ecstatic that we’ve stopped it,” said Elmont East End Civic Association President Pat Nicolosi, who worked with officers from the 5th Precinct to prevent the fair from coming back this year. “It was an out-of-town fair with no benefit to the community, and we had to cover the expense — with extra manpower — of putting it on.”

Nicolosi said that he and several officers appealed to the zoning board last year on behalf of Elmont residents to prevent the fair from returning. The board agreed to some restrictions at the fair, contingent on some new and robust security measures, including having plainclothes police at the fair during troublesome hours.

Despite the restrictions and the increased police presence, residents said the fair was just as troublesome as it had been in years past.

Last April, four Queens residents, including Shereece Codner, Jeff Desir and Christopher Wallace got into an altercation with a group of teenagers at the fair, which inhabited Belmont’s usually abandoned southwest parking lot during the last two weeks in April.

According to police, the Queens shooters — all but one were 20 years old or older — waited for the teenagers they had fought with to exit the fair, then opened fire with a .380 caliber semi-automatic handgun.

The three victims suffered non-life-threatening injuries, and were treated in local hospitals. For Elmont residents, the shooting was the tipping point for the Belmont Fair.

“Last year we had shootings, we had shootings the year before that,” Nicolosi said. “We just don’t have enough manpower at the 5th Precinct to babysit something like that.”