🌱 The 2 A.M. Google Search That Built The Root Therapy NYC

🏗️ One Developer Just Filed Plans for 450 New Apartments in Astoria

✨ LIC's Newest Luxury Tower Just Got the Green Light for Move-Ins

🎈 Free Summer Fun Is Back on the LIC Waterfront

There's a moment most people know. The one where it's 2:00 a.m. and you're finally typing it into Google. "Therapist near me." Maybe you've been putting it off for months. Maybe years. You don't want to tell anyone. You just want someone good, someone who gets it, and someone who won't make you start the whole story over again every time life gets complicated. That's the space The Root Therapy NYC was built to fill.

Katherine Casey founded the practice in 2015. She's a psychotherapist, with family roots in Astoria (her great grandmother immigrated to Astoria and her father was raised in the area), and the reason this place exists is actually pretty simple. She was in private practice, she was good at it, and she was lonely. Not personally. Professionally. She missed what happens when clinicians work together. The way you catch something in a case because a colleague sees it from a different angle. The cross-pollination of treatment approaches that you get in hospital and agency settings but almost never in private practice. So she built a group practice that operates like a team, meeting weekly, thinking deeply about cases together, and offering clients the benefit of that collective attention without them ever having to leave the room.

What makes The Root Therapy truly different is the systemic approach. Say a couple starts couples counseling. A few months in, they realize they each need individual work too. Two more therapists get assigned. A year later, one of their kids needs support. Another clinician steps in. And because the whole team meets weekly and the family has given consent, all of those therapists can sit down together. One advocating for one partner, another for the other, the couples therapist holding the relationship perspective, the child therapist centering the kid. That kind of coordination almost never happens in private practice. It often doesn't even happen in hospitals. Here, it's the model.

The practice serves ages 0 to 60 across individual, couples, family, and group therapy. Specialties include relational trauma, anxiety disorders, addiction, and personality complexes, among others. They have clinicians who specialize in non-traditional family structures, peripartum work, fertility, LGBTQ-affirming care, and adapting established therapeutic modalities to reflect the way people are actually living their lives now. They accept some insurance, offer superbills for out-of-network, and provide pro-bono and deeply subsidized services for people with financial limitations. In a neighborhood that's officially a service deficit area for psychotherapy, that matters.

The team includes Daniel Sieber, who has been working in the Astoria therapist community for over 20 years, overseeing child and family services. The practice also runs an internship program that trains people transitioning into clinical work from other careers. If you work with an intern, you're getting two clinicians for the price of one: the intern and their weekly supervisor, a fully licensed, seasoned therapist. Many of those interns go on to become full therapists in the practice, which means the relationship you build early can last for years.

Katherine's longer-term vision is a cooperative model where clinicians who grow within the practice can eventually share in its success. For now, the practice continues to expand organically, driven by community presence, word of mouth, and a reputation that keeps referrals coming in waves. You'll find them at the Astoria Park turkey trot, at Pride open streets with the LGBTQ consortium, partnering with Kids of Queens, and doing programming in District 30 schools.

If you or someone you know is looking for care, visit their website at https://theroottherapynyc.com/ to learn more about the team, the locations (Ditmars in Astoria and Flatiron in Manhattan), and how to get started. You can also follow them on social media at https://www.instagram.com/theroottherapynyc/?hl=en.

The Root Therapy NYC is doing something quietly important in this neighborhood. Making real mental health care accessible, integrated, and human. That's worth talking about, even when talking about it is the hard part.

If you've felt like construction fencing has been multiplying around Steinway Street and 41st Street lately, you're not imagining it. EMP Capital Group just filed plans with the Department of Buildings for two more residential towers in Astoria — a 99-unit building at 35-13 Steinway Street and a 77-unit building next door at 35-08 41st Street. Combined, that's 176 new apartments proposed within steps of each other, and it's only the latest chapter in a much bigger story unfolding in this pocket of the neighborhood.

The Steinway Street building would rise to 102,300 square feet and include retail space, a fitness center, a theater, and outdoor recreation space, with roughly five or six units on each floor from the third through 19th floor. Next door, the 41st Street building would pack recreation and retail space, a pet spa, and an amenity lounge on the 14th and 15th floors into 81,576 square feet, topped with rooftop outdoor space. Elichai Pariente, EMP Capital's founder, and architect Ralph Kowalczyk of Issac & Stern Architects are listed as the applicants on both filings.

Zoom out and the scale gets bigger: EMP Capital already filed plans in May for a pair of 99-unit buildings at 35-43 37th Street and 37-09 36th Avenue, plus a 79-unit building at 40-16 35th Avenue. All five projects sit within roughly three blocks of each other and would add up to more than 450 new housing units. Real estate watchers note the cluster of 99-unit buildings isn't a coincidence — it's a direct response to the 485-x tax incentive program, which requires a construction wage minimum for buildings of 100 units or more, making 99 the magic number for developers chasing the tax break.

👉 Read more: Commercial Observer

Radiant, the striking 19-story condo tower at 24-01 Queens Plaza North, received its temporary certificate of occupancy from the city's Department of Buildings this week — the official green light that means buyers can start closing on their units and moving in. It's the kind of bureaucratic milestone that doesn't sound exciting on paper but means everything if you've been watching this building rise over Queens Plaza for the past couple of years.

Designed by ODA — the firm behind those instantly recognizable recessed balconies and curved corners you've probably clocked from the Queensboro Bridge — Radiant offers 117 condos ranging from studios to two-bedrooms, with interiors by Paris Forino. The building is developed by New Empire Corp., and its amenity package includes a resident lounge, outdoor space, and a fitness center, all a short walk from multiple subway lines at Queens Plaza.

For a neighborhood that's added condo tower after condo tower over the past decade, a TCO might feel routine — but it's a real moment for the people who've had a unit under contract and are finally getting keys. Welcome to the neighborhood, new neighbors.

👉 Read more: QNS

The Hunters Point Parks Conservancy's beloved Summer Kids program kicked off this week — now in its 11th year — bringing free, drop-in programming for kids 10 and under to the Long Island City waterfront every single day at 10 a.m. through Aug. 16, rain-outs aside. It's become such a fixture of the neighborhood's summer rhythm that longtime residents plan their mornings around it.

This year's lineup mixes proven favorites with a few new additions: Wonderspark Puppets, the recycled-materials art crew at Blue Bus Project, and husband-and-wife musical duo Andy and Suzanna are all returning, while McManus Irish Dance is bringing a brand-new addition, “Jiggy Tots,” to get the youngest neighbors up and moving. Programs rotate between the turf oval at Hunter's Point South Park and the picnic tables near the Ranger Station at Gantry Plaza State Park.

The whole thing is organized and funded by the volunteer-run Hunters Point Parks Conservancy, with support from local sponsors and elected officials — a genuinely nice example of a small nonprofit keeping a big, free tradition alive for a waterfront that's grown a lot busier with young families in recent years.

👉 Read more: Hunters Point Parks Conservancy

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