Vanderbilt Avenue's Open Streets in action (Courtesy vanderbiltavenue.org)
Construction is set to disrupt Vanderbilt Ave’s Open Streets program
The bustling Open Streets season is about to coincide with construction, torn up streets and loss of water in Prospect Heights
Residents and restaurant and shop owners along Vanderbilt Avenue are bracing for inconvenience, hassle and loss of business in the coming months as the popular and lucrative Open Streets season is about to coincide with construction, torn up streets and loss of water.
The seven-block stretch of restaurants, cafes and shops happens to lie over a portion of the water and sewer system that the city says needs upgrading to accommodate new apartment complexes going up near Barclays Center at Pacific Park (formerly Atlantic Yards).
GrubStreet first reported that the “whole swaths of the street will need to be removed” to allow construction vehicles to access Vanderbilt Avenue and dig it up, occasionally shutting off water completely, during a season that has become a lifeline during and following the pandemic.
The construction is necessary, according to the city, because new residential towers sprouting up at Pacific Park will require upgraded water and sewage to meet expected demand. To make way for this construction, which is expected to happen sometime this summer, the city is also asking restaurants to remove their outdoor dining sheds at their own expense. One restaurant owner told GrubStreet that would cost him $4,000, forcing City Councilmember Crystal Hudson to demand that the Department of Sanitation to remove the sheds at no cost to businesses.
Owners also haven’t been given a concrete timeline on how long they could be left without water for long periods of the day.
“No one can say with 100 percent certainty that my café’s water line will be shut off or not,” Ciao, Gloria owner Renato Poliafito told the magazine. “They won’t know until they start tearing up the street. Other people may have more time to prepare for a shutdown, but I’ll know a couple days before.”
It’s unclear why this project couldn’t wait until the Open Street summer season is over. The initiative is not only mostly beloved by neighbors but is also a proven to be a boom for businesses according to the city’s own research: Businesses on the car-free stretch in Prospect Heights saw their sales increase 20 percent compared to the pre-pandemic era and actually outperformed the borough’s average when compared to other Open Streets in Brooklyn.
This year, it seems, the city is taking the phrase “Open Streets” literally — and plans to perform open heart surgery on the road right when it is most used.
