Parking Mall Facelift Continues

The reconstruction of a once crumbling parking mall at East Park Avenue nears completion and a second lot is slated for a similar facelift this year.

The parking mall on Park between Long Beach and Monroe Boulevard has been reconfigured so that the west side of the parking mall has an entrance and exit on the eastbound lane of Park, while the eastern half of the mall has an entrance and exit on westbound Park Avenue. The mall features a new parking surface, striping, handicap parking spaces, catch basins and brick sidewalks. Streetlights and landscaping are slated to come.    

Contractors started tearing up the deteriorated mall — beset with potholes, deep cracks and broken curbs — in September. Kevin Mulligan, the city’s commissioner of Public Works, said then that construction on a second lot on East Park, between Neptune and Roosevelt Boulevards, will start in 2012 upon approval of funding from the county, which owns both lots.

Both projects are part of an inter-municipal agreement between the City of Long Beach and Nassau County.

“These parking malls were constructed in the 1960s, and the improvements are long overdue,” Legislator Denise Ford, R-Long Beach, said in a statement. “The safety of the public is always a concern of mine, and I’m very pleased these upgrades are getting done.” 

The price tag for reconstructing the Monroe-Long Beach mall is roughly $800,0000, paid for through the county’s capital improvement funds, and $750,000 to upgrade the Neptune-Roosevelt lot, a sum that the City Council approved in March 2011.

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.