Beleaguered merchants at Underground Station await the Board of Works’ next crushing street closure bombardment.

2
278

How much more construction closures and special events disruptions can these merchants take and still survive?

Added together, the last-minute Bank and Main signal project (wouldn’t a 4-way stop have sufficed as opposed to yet another signature half-million-dollar Gahan campaign finance monetization boondoggle?) and the rear parking lot closure for Harvest Homecoming will total a full month of business pattern interruption, with precious little advance information provided to people who’ve invested in bricks and mortar and learned the hard way that the utterly non-transparent Team Gahan doesn’t understand anything about what it means to be in business, unless “being in business” means grandstanding at ribbon-cuttings.

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: Main and Bank work to begin on Monday the 13th — or was that Friday the 16th?

GREEN MOUSE SAYS: The shenanigans and ass-hattery of Deaf Gahan’s last-minute Main and Bank stop light project have commenced.

“Aladdin’s and all the merchants at the Underground Station will be open regular business hours during the complete reconstruction of Bank St. in front of the Underground Station.”

Slick Jeffie’s $500,000 stop light project at the intersection of Main and Bank, the urgent need for which has been apparent for at least six years, was stupidly delayed until the middle of September because of the mayor’s self-glorification imperatives elsewhere. It then was decreed that a two- to three-month project would be completed in 27 days — because of election year politics.

But everyone forgot about the OTHER 800-lb gorilla: Harvest Homecoming’s carnival rides, hence this morning’s abrupt notification that much of the parking on the south side of the Underground Station block will be closed until October 17.

Open, but …

The Reisz Mahal is the only thing moving here.

A business owner sent this update:

“Thank you. A number of businesses here have clients and patients with mobility issues who require ADA compliant accessibility, which was torn up and made completely unusable with no notice to us or our clients.”

I can hear the whining of Gahan’s minions: Can’t people just walk? As if a single one of the privileged time-servers grasped what walkability really means amidst their incessant car-centric “improvements.”

Or, walk — like all those people did, past an entire blocked block of Market last weekend, to behold barbecue they couldn’t purchase, from a landscape that resembled a KOA campground.

Shouldn’t the Board of Works be helping small businesses to remain in business?

Or do we take Gahanism to its logical conclusion and begin tithing donations to Gahan to protect us from Gahan?

I’ll be updating this story as merited.

2 COMMENTS

  1. I assume this is an 80/20 with INDOT project. If so, they have documentation on putting a light vs a four way stop. If 80/20 INDOT would not put in light on a whim from Gahan.

  2. I'm not sure INDOT has anything to do with it. The entire time frame from inception to realization won't even be three months.

LEAVE A REPLY