Four months after construction began on the intersection of Old Northern Boulevard and East Broadway in Roslyn, the sidewalk’s four corners remain blocked off with pylons.
Repairs began in late September at the intersection, which the Village of Roslyn says is Nassau County property. It has been closed to pedestrians since, and has yet to see an end date.
Rich Branciforte, publisher of Good Times Magazine and a member of the Roslyn Chamber of Commerce, said Tuesday at a meeting of the Village of Roslyn Board of Trustees that the four corners had been a subject of discussion at the chamber’s meetings.
Branciforte said the chamber had discussed the issue with Roslyn Deputy Mayor Marshall Bernstein and Nassau County Legislator Arnold Drucker.
“Our concern is that, as I’m sure you must realize, if somebody gets killed or hurt while going into the street; the only way you can go around the four corners is to literally go into the right-hand turn of Old Northern Boulevard or East Broadway,” Branciforte said. “You can’t get into it any other way, it’s literally closed by fencing.”
Sam Daliposki, the Roslyn village superintendent of public works, said the project was entirely under Nassau County’s jurisdiction.
“The village has nothing to do with it; it’s a county project,” Daliposki said. “And I know a lot of residents from Roslyn called them, and they say, ‘No it’s Roslyn, no it’s the Town of North Hempstead’s project.'”
Daliposki said the issue being addressed in the construction was the wiring of new traffic lights by a county contractor, Bohemia-based Commander Electric.
“They’re supposed to close East Broadway and run a wire across,” Daliposki said. “The county told them, you cannot close that road for a day, so they’re trying to find a way to run that wire, so they’re trying to run it on the north side of the road. It’s so much traffic that the county says they can’t block the road, so now they’re trying find an answer. Until the county approves how they’re going to run that wire, that project’s not going to move.”
Branciforte said that if a pedestrian got hurt on the corner, he or she “won’t sit there trying to worry about whose corner it was.”
“They’ll sue the village of Roslyn, they’ll sue the county, they’ll sue the Town of North Hempstead,” Branciforte said. “Everybody’s got certain liability in a lawsuit where there’s been an amount of delay.”
Village Attorney John Gibbon said that the village agreed with Branciforte’s point “one thousand percent.”
“We have paid the village engineer a lot of money to push this,” Gibbon said. “We’ve gotten emails as recently as an hour ago setting up meetings to try and facilitate this. We’re trying as hard as we can, and the mayor is pulling out his hair about it.”
Requests for comment from the county, Drucker’s office and the office of Legislator Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, whose district includes the Village of Roslyn, were not immediately returned.
