Updates On Delayed Street Redesign Projects On Myrtle And Flushing Avenues

Going into the new year, there are several street redesign projects around Brooklyn that are still underway, delayed for one reason or another. Among those are the Myrtle Avenue Pedestrian Plaza (between Hall Street and Emerson Place) and the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway’s Flushing Avenue portion.

As reported over at Streetsblog, the Myrtle Avenue Pedestrian Plaza has been a decade in the making, with construction postponed from 2013 to 2014, and then suspended for most of last year before restarting in August. In addition to the construction delays, now that it’s ongoing, there is an problem with water service being cut with barely any notice to residents and businesses in the area.

This project will turn two of the four blocks on the Myrtle Avenue service road between Hall Street and Emerson Place in Clinton Hill into a pedestrian plaza along the newly extended sidewalk. It’s been over ten years in the making. The Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Partnership (MARP) originally developed the concept for the project from 2005 to 2007, and DOT selected Myrtle Avenue for the first round of the NYC Plaza Program in 2008. The final design emerged in 2011 from a DOT-initiated public planning process.

According to MARP’s Meredith Phillips Almeida, . . . “I think that it was clear to us why it was delayed, but we weren’t given any preliminary timeline for when work would start up again until very near the time when it did,” Almeida told Streetsblog.

Construction paused again for the holiday shopping season at the request of the Myrtle Avenue Partnership, but Almeida said her organization has not been given any indication of when work will start back up. The most recent completion date she’s been given by DDC’s liaison is this April. “For us as the future manager of the public space, it’s very difficult to build that programming out when the end-point is a moving target,” Almeida said. “It seems incredibly ambitious in my opinion that the plaza will be open in April, but that’s still the latest that we’ve heard.”

On the city’s map of construction projects, DDC now lists the completion date as June 30.

Initial project timeline: After design delays pushed groundbreaking back a year, construction began in August 2014 with an anticipated 18-month timeline.

Current DDC official projected completion date: 6/30/2016

As for the Flushing Avenue section of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, the additions of a two-way protected bike path and sidewalk extension have barely started, despite having been slated to begin in fall of 2014, but delayed “due to subsurface infrastructure work that must happen before construction” — which may now start sometime this year and be completed in summer of 2017.