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Light Rain A wish list for East Rockaway
Residents brainstorm ideas for economic growth in the village
Three East Rockaway residents met on June 2 to discuss innovative ways to attract new businesses to the area and reinvigorate Main Street. The meeting was the first of several they are planning to discuss these topics with other community members, with a goal of ultimately approaching the village administration with their findings.
Resident Dan Caracciolo began the discussion by revealing some of the results of a public survey he launched last month to see if the community members were interested in redevelopment.
A former East Rockaway resident who completed the survey wrote that he and his wife opted to leave the village because it felt like it “had no heart” and it was “cold and dead” in the wake of Hurricane Sandy — which hit the village and neighboring Bay Park hard both physically and economically more than three years ago.
Caracciolo said that he felt there wasn’t a central hub in East Rockaway, which was compounded by the village’s two separate train stations — and resident Mike Killarney agreed.
“Rockville Centre has the movie theater, it has a lot of restaurants and a lot of bars — and that’s the biggest three draws,” Killarney said. “You get off our trains and there’s no place to go … there’s nothing there.”
The task of redevelopment across most of Long Island is to make use of underutilized space in a way that pumps revenue back into the community, while making it more connected and pedestrian-friendly. Mixed-use development and public greenery are popular components of redevelopment, which help create pleasant spaces for people to congregate. Though when people hear the term “mixed-use development,” Caracciolo said, they tend to think of structures like the Sun Valley Towers on Sunrise Highway in Valley Stream, which he said looks like “a big box.” Bike lanes, coupled with mixed-use development, help reduce automobile traffic and make it easier for downtown areas to accommodate more people comfortably, which in turn, benefits local businesses. Still, Caracciolo said he believed that East Rockaway would benefit from mixed-use development as long as it was designed in line with the character of the neighborhood. “It would probably need to look a little bit more like first-floor shops,” he said. “Almost like Brownstone-ish.”
A major finding of Caracciolo’s survey was that residents felt that there was not enough parking downtown. He also discussed less intense retrofits to accommodate parking needs and entice more businesses to come to the area, such as making an extension of Main Street toward The Reel restaurant a one-way street (similar to the Atlantic Avenue hub in Lynbrook). With a one-way street solution, the sidewalk could be extended to provide angled parking on Main Street, which would ideally drive more shoppers to the area and override the need to parallel park.
Residents also responded favorably to the idea of public Wi-Fi in the survey, which would make the downtown area more inviting for technology users. “Having an open network that people could connect to — businesses could run sort of promotions on there,” said resident Dan Gonzalez.
A few other topics discussed at the meeting were more installing eye-catching signposts to direct people to village parking; redesigning storefronts to look more sleek and uniform; and making East Rockaway a more friendly place for local artists who want to showcase their work through public sculptures or artistic street crosswalks.
Killarney said he believed more people needed to be included in the discussion on how to revitalize East Rockaway’s downtown. Caracciolo agreed that the 144 people who’d taken the survey were a “small speck” of the entire community.
The group is hoping to schedule future meetings in the coming weeks to discuss these topics before ultimately appealing to the village administration. Comments from residents and business owners will be reported in future issues of the Herald. If you’d like to take part in Caracciolo’s survey on East Rockaway revitalization, contact him at rikkisdad007@gmail.com.
