In Ridgewood, Antoinette “Ann” Maggio’s touch is everywhere: at the Grover Cleveland athletic field, which she helped to transform decades ago from a hangout for drug users to a spot where families flock; at St. Aloysius, where she taught countless numbers of children who, years later, still speak fondly of her; and at Suydam Street – a place of modest brick row homes that captured her heart for the 75 years she lived there.
Ann Maggio, left, pictured at a meeting last year reading a letter her group, Citizens for a Better Ridgewood, received from Grover Cleveland High School thanking them for helping staff and students fight the city’s plan to close the school. After proposing to phase out the school, the city opted to keep the institution open last year. File Photo
Maggio, who died Friday at the age of 90, was, her fellow civic leaders said, the institutional memory of Ridgewood – a neighborhood for which she never stopped fighting to improve. Moving to Suydam Street as a teenager with her parents, Maggio went on to become a name synonymous with civic life – as the president of Citizens for a Better Ridgewood, a member of Community Board 5, president of the Suydam Street Block Association, and a member of the Onderdonk Civic’s board of directors. It would be impossible to compile a list – at least one that would be able to fit in a newspaper article – of everything Maggio did during the decades she devoted to civic life in Ridgewood – but, suffice to say, she loved her neighborhood with a fervor that propelled her to do everything from fight for capital improvement projects at area parks to pressure the city to keep Grover Cleveland High School open – which it did – to wiping graffiti from her beloved streets.
“We’ve lost one of the great ones in Queens,” said Cathy Moore, who heads the Queens borough president’s domestic violence department and worked closely with Maggio for years – often sending her the numerous newspaper clippings she found featuring the civic leader. “She was so dedicated to everything she did.”
Maggio, who is survived by her son and daughter, received many accolades over the years, one of them being the Queens Heroine Award in March 2004 – as well as a certificate from Queens Borough President Helen Marshall in 2009 for her then 10 years of service on CB 5.
“She was one of the great strengths of civic life in Ridgewood for at least 30 years and really was the rock in the northwest area in Ridgewood for many, many years,” said CB 5 District Manager Gary Giordano, who served on the Onderdonk Civic with Maggio in the 1980s. “I know few people as courageous or caring as Ann was.”
Born in 1922, Maggio and her family moved to Suydam Street when she was a teenager – and she remained in the same house for 75 years. During those decades, she saw Ridgewood change, morphing from a place where her mother would buy vegetables from a farmer on Flushing Avenue to a neighborhood, once primarily inhabited by German-Americans, that attracted immigrants from around the world, including many from eastern Europe.
“What has remained the same is the closeness of all, no matter what their backgrounds might be,” Maggio said in a 2002 interview with the Daily News. “We have remained a close-knit neighborhood regardless of our own heritage.”
A former teacher at St. Aloysius, Maggio first dipped her feet into the waters of civic life in order to transform the Grover Cleveland athletic field, Giordano said.
“There was a lot of trouble at the athletic field – a lot of substance abuse and drug dealing there,” Giordano said. “That athletic field is, in many ways, the heart of that civic area.”
Giordano said Maggio and other civic leaders, including himself, worked with the police to establish a baseball and softball program at the field – which kept the area from being vacant and drove away the troublemakers.
“After Grover Cleveland, Ann was focused on whatever she knew to be the important issues in that northwest section of Ridgewood,” Giordano said. “She worked to keep the neighborhood clean, keep it graffiti-free, keep up the condition of the roadways.”
And, for Maggio, there was nothing better than fighting for her community.
“You want to keep going and keep the neighborhood going because not all of us want to move out to the island or whatever,” Maggio said in the same 2002 interview. “We want to stay put.”
By Anna Gustafson
