Village of Rockville Centre to redo North Park Avenue

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Some underground work has already been done on North Park Avenue. The village will begin tearing up and repaving the entire road next month.
Some underground work has already been done on North Park Avenue. The village will begin tearing up and repaving the entire road next month.
Christina Daly/Herald

Rockville Centre will spend nearly $1.2 million to renovate North Park Avenue.

The village board of trustees approved a bid from Roadwork Ahead at a briefing session on July 7 to redo the streetscapes, lighting, sidewalks, curbs, aprons and the road itself. The business district will keep its distinctive brick and cement sidewalks.

“… [W]e’d like to start the work, particularly the work that occurs between Hillside [Avenue] and Grand [Avenue] on North Park,” said Village Administrator Kathleen Murray. “That work could take two months to get done, and we’d like to be out of that area before school starts.”

There are two schools in that area, South Side Middle School and St. Agnes Cathedral School. According to village spokeswoman Julie Scully, the village does not expect the work to be completed by the time school starts, but it would like the road to be usable.

The work will start at Hillside Avenue, on the north end of North Park, sometime within the next month, officials hope, and move southward. “The project will, in all likelihood, take through October to complete,” Scully wrote in an email. “There will be times, without question, that the road will be closed, we couldn’t do the work with cars and trucks driving the road. We don’t know which parts of the road will be closed on what dates yet. That will come much later in the process.”

The work will be funded with a bond. The debt service on the bond has not been finalized, and it will be issued next winter.

In March, the village replaced water mains and infrastructure below the road surface. “National Grid also came and upgraded the gas delivery infrastructure too,” Scully wrote in the email. “The water main projects [are] clearly an element of the roadway renovation.”

In the meantime, construction from National Grid, which is still in the area, has affected local businesses. Carol Hoenig, the co-owner of Turn of the Corkscrew Books and Wine, which opened last October, said that trucks take up spots that her customers could use. “They said it was going to take several months to do it,” she said. “I wish it had been last summer, when we weren’t open yet.”

She added, however, that she is looking forward to the result. “When this gets finished, we’re excited,” she said. “It sounds like it’s going to look really nice.” She added that the bookstore’s events are usually held at night, when the street is open.

George Martin the Original, on North Park, is currently closed for lunch and does not open until 4 p.m., near the end of working hours. But Maureen Robb, operations manager of the George Martin Group, said that the restaurant would restore lunch hours sometime in September. Roadwork in the past few months has been disruptive, she said.

“Does it make it easier for everybody? No,” Robb said. “But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done.”