Goffle Road Merchants Stuck Between a Rock (Road) and a Hard Place

"We barely had any customers here after the road closed. Mostly, it was friends of ours who knew how to get here through the back roads. People don't seem to know how to get here," said Sarah Bartoldus of Saturday's business in her antique shop, Then and Now Classics, located next door to the Ambulatory Center on Goffle Road.

Bartoldus and other area business owners are concerned about the PSE&G line work that caused a double-lane closure beginning Saturday on Goffle Road, between Rock Road in Hawthorne and Wyckoff Avenue in Wyckoff. The roadway is tentatively scheduled to be reopened on Wednesday evening, although intermittent road work requiring sporadic closures will continue until at least November.

The road closures affect more than a dozen Wyckoff and Ridgewood businesses located on Goffle Road. Most of the small business owners there have two concerns: the new traffic patterns and detours are making it harder for customers to visit their stores, and they say they were not warned about the closure.

"We have had customers calling us who are stuck in traffic and aren't sure how to get here," said Don Fetterman, owner of Goffle Road Poultry.

Many merchants are finding that instead of trying to battle traffic and routes they are unsure of, potential customers just stay home or go elsewhere.

Anny Im, the owner of Happy Cleaners, said, "Even our weekly usuals are not coming in. Three-quarters of the people we see every Saturday were not here this week."

The Wyckoff and Ridgewood police officers guarding the edges of the road closures said they are allowing local and business-related traffic through, in an effort to keep local industries from suffering. However, Donna Dorsey, owner of Goffle Brook Farm and Garden Center on the Ridgewood side of the road, explains that the road closure set-ups are not conducive to letting traffic through, because drivers must ask police for permission to pass.

"Not everyone is going to ask," she said. "They see a road block, and they just drive past it."

Most owners wish that they had been given more notice of these closures, so that they could have planned accordingly, and let potential customers know that they can still drive on Goffle to shop.

"We would have put up signs by Rock Road and Wyckoff Avenue to let our customers know we were still open, but we didn't have time to do that since we didn't know this was going to happen," Fetterman said.

"I understand that they're updating the system and doing important work, but they need to cooperate with local businesses who are trying to make a living here. They should have had a more effective way of warning us that this was going to happen," he said.

Wyckoff police Chief Benjamin Fox said his department is trying to help affected business people as much as possible, but that a big "part of the problem is that this is an on-again, off-again project. Their plans (PSE&G) change so quickly that we don't have time to let motorists and shop owners know what they've got to deal with on any given day.

"This is a significant inconvenience," Fox said. "It could be a big hit for those businesses, which is even more unfortunate in this economy."

Of the line transmission work, PSE&G representative Fox McQuillen said "everything is planned ahead, but there are factors we can't control that affect the closures. You need your cable to be delivered on time; weather events affect you. So, we can't pin it down exactly, but we are working with the police department, and our number one concern is citizen safety. Buses and emergency vehicles will be allowed through."

In an effort to ease concerns of residents and business owners, McQuillen has been fielding phone calls and answering questions about the nature, duration, and tentative scheduling of the work. As for business owners' reactions, he said, "I wouldn't say they're happy about it, but they are willing to cooperate."

The township did feature notification of the pending closures on its Web site, www.wyckoff-nj.com, and alerts were sent to local media. However, as Fox has said, the nature of the work makes it hard to predict traffic patterns in advance. For example, the township was notified of the double-lane closure only late last week.

Anyone registered with the township's website received notification of both the initial work necessitating a one-lane closure, as well as the double-lane closure motorists and merchants encountered this weekend. However, PSE&G was supposed to notify businesses about the project, Fox has said.

Fetterman said, "no one from Public Service or anywhere else contacted us."

Dorsey added, "I just don't understand how you could have closures like this without sending a registered letter or something."

Patch will continue to post information related to closures, and anyone who registers at the township's website can receive e-mail notifications when new information is available.