Paradise Ave

Dear Mayor, Council and other village officials,

Paradise Avenue traffic is becoming more and more of a problem. Now we hear that the SOUK, which runs on Ferdon in the winter, wants to move to the Goswick Pavilion/Rittenberg Field at the entrance to the pier. As you will see from the pictures below, Paradise is a narrow street and when people park to kayak, hike or attend mass, it basically becomes a one lane road. We’ve already had close calls with road rage, bottle necks and near accidents. To permit any more traffic, particularly on the weekends, is irresponsible, unreasonable and will cause undo harm and be an inconvenience to our tiny block, which as I said, already deals with kayaker, church and tourist parking… by the way I happen to like the SOUK.

Furthermore, Paradise Ave should really be closed to the pier condominiums. When approved in the 80’s, I’m told that that entrance was supposed to be only for emergency access. This would be no inconvenience to any condo resident since it’s the same time to take the main entrance vs cutting thru Paradise.

What the village elders didn’t know back in the early 80’s when the condos were approved is that this thing called the internet would be invented and result in so many people doing online shopping causing a lot of deliveries... We now have UPS, FedEx, Peapod and every other delivery truck speeding down our narrow street. What they also did not take into account was that after 20 plus years after they were built all the units would begin to get renovated, which in turn has caused every kind of construction vehicle coming down Paradise morning and night, nonstop. Or maybe they did know this and someone just took down the chain years ago to cut 15 seconds off their trip.

While Paradise is a lovely street with wonderful folks, we still have to deal with plenty of outside traffic ranging from pier visitors to tourists, not to mention the bikers which we all deal with. We have young children on the block and need to show some concern. I personally paid for the yellow traffic safety flag men and maintain the American Flags, which if you can believe it are constantly vandalized. I did this as my own small effort to slow folks down. Any professional traffic engineer would agree that there is no reason to use the Paradise entrance to the condos and additional traffic caused by a new community market would cause us grave harm. Also with the goose poop problem in Rittenberg Field I think putting a community market there might pose a health problem.

Let’s leave the community market in the M&T parking lot, which keeps visitors downtown, visiting our other shops, and address the racetrack and truck route that Paradise Ave has sadly become!

Sincerely,

William Procida