Members of the Pop the Bubble Coalition making posters. Photo via Instagram.
Pop the Astoria Bubble is bigger than tennis and the rest of NYC should be listening.
BY NICOLAS STERGIOU | nicolas.stergiou@gmail.com
Astoria has become very good at organizing itself.
A group starts because people want to pick up garbage. Another wants to make Mondays slightly less depressing. Someone gets involved in a political campaign, somebody else starts a neighborhood Instagram page, and before long the same people keep appearing at the same events. What looks like a collection of unrelated clubs and political campaigns start functioning like a loose civic network or crossover episode on Instagram. That network may be one of Astoria’s greatest political strengths: groups built around completely different interests can still recognize when there is something worth showing up for together.
The latest issue bringing that network together is the proposed tennis bubble at Astoria Park. NYC Parks issued a Request for Proposals in June seeking a private operator for an indoor tennis and sports facility at the park. Opponents organized Pop the Astoria Bubble, a coalition that’s argued the proposal would raise costs for tennis players by placing a substantial portion of the public tennis courts under a long-term private concession.
I should be clear about where I stand: I am against the bubble. I play tennis, but you do not have to play tennis to care about this. Astoria Park belongs to the neighborhood, and putting a large portion of an existing public recreational facility under a long-term private concession deserves scrutiny. Parks are among the few places left in New York where access should not depend on your ability to pay.
What makes this fight more interesting than the bubble itself is who has joined it. Pop the Astoria Bubble has worked with Astoria Trash Club and organizers with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on court cleanup. At a recent event, attendees picked up garbage while talking to neighbors about the proposal, which is perhaps the most Astoria form of political organizing imaginable: clean the park while explaining why you do not want part of it privatized.
Hot Girls Organize—formerly Hot Girls for Zohran, a group of political organizers known for viral campaign videos and organizing across the city during Zorhan’s mayoral campaign—has also joined the coalition, collaborating with former congressional candidate Chuck Park on a video that used comedy to make the serious case against the Astoria Park tennis bubble. Astoria Monday Club, a social group built around giving people something to look forward to on the most hated day of the week, has similarly expanded into neighborhood organizing and community cleanups.
At this point it feels a little like the Astoria Cinematic Universe. Every club gets its own origin story and eventually appears in the giant crossover event. Except instead of the Avengers assembling to fight Thanos, Astoria has assembled to fight a 20-year Parks Department concession agreement by Popping the proposed Astoria bubble. The important part of the crossover is that none of these groups had to merge into one organization first.
The jokes work because there is something serious just beneath them. Local civic life often begins with something people enjoy—tennis, cleanups, social clubs, videos or campaigns. Those activities create relationships that become useful when something happens people care about.
An election produces more than a winner and a loser. Chuck Park may have lost his congressional primary, but volunteers who met through that campaign stayed connected; their WhatsApp group is still active. In a video posted shortly after the election, Park encouraged followers to stay involved locally, and he has continued doing so himself. Campaigns teach people how to canvass, organize events and understand local institutions. The candidate leaves the ballot, but the network can remain.
The same principle applies beyond any particular political organization. You can belong to DSA or want absolutely nothing to do with DSA. You can be progressive, moderate, politically unaffiliated or someone who only gets involved when something happens three blocks from their apartment. Local politics does not require everyone to agree on everything. It only requires enough people to find the thing they agree on.
More than 3,850 people have signed the petition opposing the proposal. That represents substantial organized opposition compared to the pro-bubble petition, which has just 346 signatures as of this week. Queens Community Board 1 itself has taken a more conditional position, supporting limits on how many courts could be enclosed, preserving some free public court access, seasonal operation and Parks Committee review of the final contract before it is executed.
Former US diplomat, Congressional candidate and activist Chuck Park has apparently come on board the Pop the Bubble Coalition. Photo via Instagram.
As I write this, Queens Community Board 1’s September 22 full board meeting has not happened yet. By the time this column is published, Pop the Astoria Bubble organizers and supporters will have had their chance to speak during the public portion of the meeting at The Marquee at Astoria. The tennis proposal was not the main scheduled business of the evening, but residents planned to make sure it became part of the conversation anyway.
To me, that is civic engagement in its most useful form—and it makes local politics a lot less boring.
Community boards are not glamorous institutions. They deal with the nuts and bolts of city life—land use, sanitation, transportation, parks and all the small decisions that eventually determine what a neighborhood becomes. But they also give residents a place to speak before those decisions disappear into the machinery of government.
I don’t believe every petition should automatically determine public policy, and showing up with the most people does not make one side automatically correct. The government still has to consider competing interests. I’m open to hearing a case for how a private bubble could benefit the community without pricing people out.
But strong participation matters. Anyone can sign a petition. Anyone can go to a community board meeting. But going together, organized in a combined coalition from nothing—that’s power.
When residents organize, research proposals, clean public spaces and spend their evenings sitting through community board meetings, elected officials and city agencies should take that engagement seriously. In this case, I think they should also reconsider whether putting public courts under a long-term private concession is the right direction for Astoria Park, considering there are already plenty of private tennis courts in Queens.
The “Keep Parks Public” slogan works because you do not need to understand every page of an RFP to understand the basic and widely accepted principle behind it.
Astoria will continue disagreeing about plenty of things like bike lanes, parking, and the seemingly unstoppable use of AI food flyers. That is healthy. But what gives the neighborhood its political character is the growing habit of participation—and the way groups built around very different interests can find common ground when something matters. The tennis players know the trash collectors. Campaign volunteers know the social clubs. Organizers know the satirists. Everybody eventually ends up in the same group chat.
Then one day the group chat becomes a cleanup, the cleanup becomes a petition, and the petition becomes a room full of neighbors asking their government to listen.
That may be Astoria’s real political strength: not that everyone thinks the same way or has the same goal in mind, but that so many different corners of the neighborhood have gotten very good at showing up together for the greater good of the neighborhood and to send a general message to New York City and everywhere else – keep the damn parks public.
Nicolas Stergiou is an Astoria-born social media manager, labor organizer and unofficial “Astoria Street Spectator.”
