Parking Mall Goes Under the Knife

An East Avenue parking mall is undergoing a facelift, one of two lots on Long Beach’s main thoroughfare slated for reconstruction.

Contractors started to rip up the deteriorate lot — beset with potholes, deep cracks and broken curbs — between Long Beach Boulevard and Monroe Boulevard in September, and they plan to refurbish a second lot, between Neptune Boulevard and Roosevelt Boulevard by next year. Both projects are part of an inter-municipal agreement between the City of Long Beach and Nassau County.

Kevin Mulligan, the city’s commissioner of Public Works, said the contractor still must submit many shop drawings, including for street lamps, drainage structures, concrete mix and brick pavers, and that the lot's configuration will be modified to more closely resemble recently upgraded malls in town.

“The center roadway will be removed,” Mulligan said about the passage that divides the Monroe-Long Beach lot. “The west side of the parking mall will have an entrance and exit on the east bound lane of Park Avenue and the eastern half of the mall will have a entrance and exit on westbound Park Avenue.”

Mulligan said that, weather permitting, the Monroe-Long Beach mall will likely be completed by year’s end, and work on the Neptune-Roosevelt mall will start next year, upon approval of funding from the county, which owns both lots.

The price tag for reconstructing the Monroe-Long Beach mall is about $800,0000, paid for through the county’s capital improvement funds, and $750,000 for upgrading the Neptune-Roosevelt lot, a sum that the City Council approved earlier this year.

In March, the council unanimously gave a green light to a municipal cooperation agreement with the county to reconstruct the lots. The county will fully reimburse the city for the designs and reconstructions costs for the parking malls. Last November, with the Melville-based RBA Group to redesign the parking malls.

The city wanted to expedite the project by funding and performing the engineering and reconstruction work in order to break ground by spring 2011, rather than have the county pay up front and risk having the project delayed for months. Even though the project was still delayed, Mulligan believes it worked out faster through the agreement.    

“This intergovernmental cooperation proved to be a faster and more efficient method for rehabilitating a parking lot that had fallen into a significant state of disrepair,” Mulligan said.