Queens Animal Shelter Opens, Ending Decades-Long Wait for Borough’s First Public Facility

A long-delayed public animal shelter, the first in Queens, will open its doors Tuesday — more than 20 years since plans were first put into motion.

The 50,000-square-foot shelter will open at 1906 Flushing Ave. in Ridgewood, Queens, with capacity for 72 dogs and 110 cats. It will also have group housing and space for small pets like guinea pigs, as well as a grassy place for rabbits to roam.

It comes at a critical time when the city’s existing Animal Care Centers facilities cope with chronic overcrowding. Especially since the outbreak of the pandemic, New Yorkers have surrendered their pets to public facilities at high rates, usually due to financial pressure or a lack of proper housing, as THE CITY previously reported .

The $75 million city-funded shelter joins a new Staten Island facility that opened its doors in 2022 as well as the system’s Manhattan location in East Harlem. New shelters are under construction now in The Bronx and Brooklyn as well.

In May, the most recent month for which data is available, ACC facilities took in 1,560 animals — including 525 dogs and 941 cats.

Nearly 80% of those animals were adopted, returned to their owner or transferred to other animal organizations. Just over 7% of animals that month died or were euthanized. Shelters nationwide face an uphill battle against overcrowding as adoptions for pets — particularly dogs — have declined, according to ACC officials.

Risa Weinstock, the chief executive officer of ACC, has been with the organization since 2008. She said the promise of brand new shelters always felt far away while she was focused on the “here and now, which was so chaotic.”

“It wasn’t until like 2015 where we really started to feel like this might happen,” she told THE CITY.

The new shelter — which is around four times larger than the one in Manhattan — will fill an immediate void as it coincides with the closure of the Brooklyn facility last week for renovations. That ACC, in East New York, is expected to reopen in 2026.

The new Queens facility was designed and built with the lessons from existing shelters, which were usually retrofitted to accommodate animals, Weinstock said.

The front lobby is designed for a better intake, with separate entrances for surrenders and adoptions. This helps visitors off the bat, compared to existing shelters where all visitors were thrown together “waiting for the happy experience, the sad experience, the crazy experience” depending on what brought them to ACC, Weinstock said.

The dog kennels have privacy screens so the pups don’t have to stare at each other, which could lead to fighting. The dogs’ space also has a  retractable roof to let in natural light.

Built-in hoses and water hook-ups are installed all over the shelter, “because there’s always animals somewhere,” Weinstock said.

ACC plans to hire between 80 and 100 new staffers as well and invite the community into the building whether visitors plan to adopt or not.

“We wanted this to be not just like a place where animals go, which is how everybody thinks of a shelter,” Weinstock said.

“This is a place where we want — even if you don’t have a pet, don’t want a pet — we still want you to come in and see us and meet us.”

Once Animal Care Centers secured city funding for the shelter, challenges still loomed. Finding the right location was hard because of zoning restrictions, according to Weinstock. And when they chose their current location it needed extensive environmental cleanup.

The Queens facility will provide comprehensive adoption counseling and will eventually also offer full veterinary services, which could help people keep their pets long term. People sometimes give up their pets because they can’t afford treatment.

Political Puppy Love

Plans for the shelter started long before a shovel was ever in the ground with a New York City Council bill passed in 2000 that required each borough to have its own shelter for animals.

The plan was tied to a push to require dogs and cats be sterilized before they’re sold in stores or adopted out of shelters.

At the time, the Staten Island shelter was set to expand, and Queens and The Bronx were supposed to get their own shelters, with an estimated price tag of $4.4 million each year.

The bill was introduced by then-Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr., who represented Astoria and spoke at the time about the overpopulation at animal shelters.

“The consequences of the overpopulation of unwanted animals are drastic for the animals and painful for the people who love and care for them,” he said at the time.

But the city’s budget and political obstacles delayed it. In later years, Peter’s sons Peter Jr. and Paul, who each represented different districts in Queens, took up the cause for animals.

After Paul Vallone left office, he worked at the Department of Veterans Services before dying of a heart attack in January 2024. He was just 56 years old.

Now the shelter expansion in Queens will bear his name. His daughter Lea said of her father at a March Council hearing to approve the naming: “I can’t think of an animal who did not love him back.”

Last week, his brother Peter, now a judge in Queens, talked about the naming to honor his kid brother, in a family where their mother instilled their love of animals.

“The animals of New York City deserve a shelter in every borough, and I can’t think of a better person to name it after than my brother,” he said.

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