A new look for West Hempstead?

A fifth of a mile isn’t much of a distance, but if a blighted area of a community is that large, it can seem like a huge open wound.

A stretch of Hempstead Avenue in West Hempstead, between Hempstead Gardens Drive and Westminster Road, is particularly bleak: On one side of the road are warehouses and parking lots, and on the other is a large, often vacant, parking lot. Residents blame the area’s decay on the crime-ridden Courtesy Hotel, which once stood nearby, holding the northeastern corner of the 2.8-square-mile hamlet hostage for 15 years.

Although residents fought for years to prevent the hotel’s disrepute from afflicting their community, it wasn’t until the Courtesy was demolished in May that they breathed a sigh of satisfied relief, knowing that now things could finally improve. While locals are optimistic about The Alexan at West Hempstead Station, a four-story residential complex with 150 units that will replace the hotel, they are still working hard to heal the Courtesy’s wound.

“Knowing that a whole area is going to change, I think it’s going to open up a lot of avenues to people looking at the location differently,” Rosalie Norton, president of the West Hempstead Community Support Association, told the Herald. “There are very few areas in the Town of Hempstead and Nassau County that are ripe for development, and this is one area that holds a tremendous amount of potential.”

Barry Leon, a 28-year West Hempstead resident, recognizes that potential and is optimistic about the prospect of change — so much so that he has proposed building a complex of garden apartments on what is now the AVF Development Corp. property, at 40 Hempstead Gardens Drive.

“That area has been a deserted corner that nobody wanted to be in when the Courtesy Hotel was there,” Leon said last week. “The fact that that changed, the fact that it’s going to be nice apartments, is going to make it more of a community.”