FYI: Urban Outdoors, an open space advocacy newsletter, reports that the city has scrapped its controversial plan to build a strip mall on a parcel of environmentally sensitive land along the Jamaica Bay waterfront in Rosedale, Queens. The Economic Development Corporation had planned to sell 23 acres of land along the bay to a developer that was to build six buildings of commercial property and a 500-space parking lot. Activists complained that the city’s designation of the strip as “vacant” overlooked its key role in buffering the bay’s already fragile ecology. [2/19/03]