Kew Gardens Personal Injury Lawyer

Our office is at 109-12 Jamaica Avenue in Richmond Hill, the next neighbourhood south of Kew Gardens. Not a satellite address and not a mail drop — it is where we work, and you can be here in minutes.

We handle injury claims for people across Kew Gardens: car accidents, slip and falls, construction injuries, and everything in between. We work on contingency, which means you pay nothing unless we win.

Call 718-659-5333, or come in. Open 7am to 9pm, Monday to Friday and Sunday.

Where your Kew Gardens case will be heard — and it is not the courthouse you can see

There is a large courthouse on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens, and a lot of people assume that is where their case goes. It is not.

The building at 125-01 Queens Boulevard houses the criminal courts, the Queens District Attorney and the Criminal Term of the Supreme Court. Queens Borough Hall sits beside it at 120-55. Personal injury cases are civil matters, and they are filed and heard at the Queens County Supreme Court, Civil Term, at 88-11 Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica.

That is a short run down the Van Wyck or along Hillside Avenue, and our office is a few minutes from it. Motion appearances, depositions, compliance conferences and filings all happen there, which keeps the routine parts of a case quick for both of us.

The Interchange, and why it defines this neighbourhood

Kew Gardens sits at the edge of the Kew Gardens Interchange, where the Van Wyck Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, the Jackie Robinson Parkway and Union Turnpike all meet. The state puts the traffic through it at close to six hundred thousand vehicles a day. It has been called the Pretzel and the Maze, and both names are earned.

The state rebuilt it, and the scale tells you what condition it was in: groundbreaking in August 2010, completion announced in December 2022, $739 million, twenty-two new bridges. The official explanation for the work was that deficiencies throughout the interchange contributed to congestion and higher than average accident rates. The project also eliminated a pedestrian route that had forced people to make three separate crossings of high-speed traffic, replacing it with a dedicated path to the subway station.

Even rebuilt, it remains an incomplete junction. Several movements between those highways still cannot be made directly, so drivers finish the connection on Union Turnpike and Queens Boulevard instead. Highway traffic ends up on the streets people walk across.

And the construction has not finished in the area. The state’s Van Wyck capacity project, running from the Interchange south to JFK, has been under way for years with completion expected around now. Changed lane patterns, shifting merges and temporary configurations are a live factor in crashes on that stretch.

On the hard numbers: for Queens Boulevard between Union Turnpike and Hillside Avenue — the stretch along Kew Gardens’ northern and eastern edge — the city recorded 233 people injured between 2016 and 2020, with five of the six severe injuries being pedestrians, and a pedestrian killed in 2021. Most of those pedestrian injuries happened to people crossing in the crosswalk, with the signal, hit by a driver who failed to yield.

One thing worth saying plainly: no agency publishes a crash count for the Interchange itself. If you read a firm quoting a specific number of accidents there, they have invented it. What is documented is the official characterisation of a higher than average accident rate, and the corridor figures above.

Why Kew Gardens produces the claims it does

Beyond the highways, Kew Gardens has a street layout that is genuinely unusual for New York. It was laid out in 1909 as a garden suburb and its streets curve to follow the land rather than running on a grid — Metropolitan Avenue, Lefferts Boulevard and Audley Street among them. Curved streets mean shorter sight lines, and shorter sight lines matter when a driver says they did not see someone.

The cases we see most often from this part of Queens:

• Pedestrian collisions crossing Queens Boulevard and Union Turnpike
• Crashes on the Van Wyck service roads and at the Interchange approaches
• Rear-end and merge collisions in the Van Wyck construction zones
• Slip and fall injuries along the Lefferts Boulevard shopping strip and in apartment buildings
• Falls at the Kew Gardens–Union Turnpike subway station and the Kew Gardens LIRR station, where an MTA claim carries a strict 90-day notice deadline
• Bridge strikes and debris incidents on the Jackie Robinson Parkway, where commercial vehicles are barred and clearances are low

The claims we handle in Kew Gardens

Most of what comes through the door from this neighbourhood falls into a handful of categories.

• Car accidents on Queens Boulevard, Union Turnpike, Lefferts Boulevard, Metropolitan Avenue and the Van Wyck
• Pedestrian and cyclist collisions, particularly on the wide crossings at the top of the neighbourhood
• Slip and fall and premises claims in apartment buildings and co-ops
• Construction accidents, which in New York carry protections most workers do not know they have — including ones that apply regardless of immigration status or whether you were paid off the books
• Truck and commercial vehicle crashes — noting that the Jackie Robinson and Grand Central Parkways bar commercial vehicles outright, which can itself be a fact in the case
• E-bike and e-scooter collisions
• Bus injuries and subway and LIRR claims, all subject to the 90-day MTA notice
• Hit and run, and crashes where the other driver had no insurance

Sidewalk falls in Kew Gardens usually work in your favour

Since 2003, New York City has placed responsibility for most sidewalks on the owner of the building beside them. The exception is owner-occupied one-, two- and three-family homes used purely as residences — for those, the City remains responsible, and the deadline drops from three years to a 90-day notice of claim.

Kew Gardens is one of the neighbourhoods where that exception bites least. The city’s own planning study of this area found that multi-family apartment buildings are concentrated here, and around six in ten households in the core Kew Gardens ZIP code rent rather than own. The prewar Tudor apartment houses, the six-storey buildings near the LIRR station and the co-ops along Austin Street are none of them one- to three-family homes. On those sidewalks, the building owner answers, and you have three years rather than ninety days.

The quieter detached streets toward Forest Park are the other case, where the exemption may apply.

There is one further wrinkle particular to Kew Gardens: the community board records that a number of streets within the neighbourhood remain privately owned rather than municipal. Liability on a private street is not the same analysis as on a City street. We have not found a published list of which ones, so if you fell on a street here it is worth establishing that point early rather than assuming.

Where you were treated matters

Jamaica Hospital Medical Center sits directly on the Van Wyck, which is where serious Interchange and expressway crash victims are usually taken. It is the area’s Level I trauma centre, handles over 117,000 emergency patients a year — and it is a private not-for-profit. A claim against it follows ordinary rules.

NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens on 164th Street is the city hospital, still widely called Queens Hospital Center. A claim arising from care there carries the 90-day notice requirement.

Two hospitals serving the same highway, on opposite sides of the deadline. If you were treated after your accident, bring the paperwork to your first appointment.

What to do after an accident in Kew Gardens

Get medical attention the same day, even if you feel fine. A gap between the accident and the first treatment is the first thing an insurer uses against you.

Call 911 and get a police report. Kew Gardens is covered by the 102nd Precinct in Richmond Hill. If the police do not attend, file a report yourself.

Photograph the scene before anything is moved — the vehicles, the road, the hazard, your injuries. If your crash was on or near the Van Wyck, photograph the lane markings and any temporary construction signage. Those configurations change, and what the road looked like on the day is evidence that disappears.

Take names and numbers from witnesses. Do not give a recorded statement to the other side’s insurer — you are not obliged to, and it is rarely used to help you.

Watch the deadlines. Three years from the date of the accident for most personal injury claims in New York. Ninety days for a notice of claim if the City, the MTA or a public hospital is involved.

Kew Gardens injury claims — common questions

Where will my case be heard?

Queens County Supreme Court, Civil Term, at 88-11 Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica. Not the courthouse on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens — that building handles criminal matters and the District Attorney’s office, not personal injury claims.

How long do I have to bring a claim?

Generally three years from the date of the accident in New York, and two and a half years for medical malpractice. If a city agency, the MTA or a public hospital is involved, a notice of claim has to be filed within 90 days. Call early rather than waiting to see how you heal.

My crash happened in a construction zone on the Van Wyck. Does that change anything?

It can. Lane configurations, signage and temporary merges in a work zone are all things that can be examined, and they change over time — which makes early photographs and an early records request worth a great deal. Depending on who was responsible for the work zone, there may be a public entity involved, which brings the 90-day deadline back into play.

I fell on a sidewalk outside an apartment building. Who pays?

Almost certainly the building owner or the co-op corporation, and you have three years. The exemption that puts claims on a 90-day clock applies only to owner-occupied one- to three-family homes, and Kew Gardens has proportionally fewer of those than most of Queens.

What does it cost to start?

Nothing. We work on contingency, which means we take a percentage only if we win. If we recover nothing for you, you owe us nothing.

Do I have to come to the office?

No. We can take the details over the phone or on WhatsApp, and if your injuries make travel difficult we will come to you. But we are the next neighbourhood over — 109-12 Jamaica Avenue.

It’s Time To Win Your Case, Big.

Michael D. Ribowsky and his accident lawyers handle claims for physical and psychological injuries caused by someone else’s negligence. A great deal turns on timing and on detail — what was photographed, when treatment started, who was spoken to and when. Those are the things that decide what a case is worth, and they are decided in the first days rather than at the end.

We take every case seriously and we do what it takes to recover the most the facts will support, which depends on where and how you were injured and what it has cost you. Kew Gardens is one of many neighbourhoods we cover. See how we work across the borough and how we work across the whole borough.