Angry parents met at the Queensbridge housing project in Long Island City over the death of five-year-old Nathan Goldstein who was struck and killed by a truck while crossing Vernon Boulevard at 41st Street after leaving a public bus on his way home from school. The residents demanded that the city either build a school within the project or provide school buses. They voted to keep their children out of school for three days in the coming week to protest the dangerous situation which forced small children to cross heavily trafficked, dangerous roads to get to and from school. This was not the first accident or fatality.
Queensbridge, opened in 1939, is the largest public housing project in North America with about 7,000 residents. According to Wikipedia, the housing project deliberately was built without the amenities that would make it attractive to middle class residents. In the 1940s the residents were overwhelmingly white; separate housing projects had been built for blacks including one in South Jamaica. The tenants association was activist and generally left-wing in its politics. They were among the few organizations to file early protests against the privately owned Stuyvesant Town project. During the war many of the residents worked in defense plants in Long Island City. This caused some dissension since initially the housing authority lifted the income ceiling for defense workers but not for other residents. who were not allowed to earn more than $3,000 a year. In the 1950s the higher income residents, mostly white, were moved into middle income housing projects and replaced by lower income blacks and Hispanics.