Upgrades for downtown?

Almost two years ago, the Lynbrook village board hired a planning team to design a blueprint detailing how the village could revitalize its downtown commercial district. The planning group, Regional Planning Associates, unveiled the blueprint at the Oct. 19 village board meeting, highlighting five locations in the village that are prime for redevelopment.

“We drilled it down to five sites,” said Robert Freudenberg, RPA’s senior planner for Long Island. “These locations are the most ripe for the village to employ the concepts we came up with.”

The five proposed sites are the movie theater on Merrick Road; the feather factory at 47 Broadway; the parking fields at Broadway and Langdon Place and the private lot along Merrick Road that serves the Astoria Federal bank office building; the area under the Long Island Rail Road tracks on Atlantic Avenue; and the parking field at Earle and Stauderman avenues.

Regional Planing Associates, a not-for-profit regional planning organization, spent 2008 photographing the village, bouncing redevelopment ideas off a stakeholders committee — a group of Lynbrook business owners and key property owners who offered insight on how and where the village needed revitalization — and determining how to create a unified, walking-distance business district. Freudenberg said that every successful downtown needs a “Main Street,” or an anchor, and he believes that Atlantic Avenue could serve that purpose.

Gloria Gardner, a Lynbrook resident who was a member of the stakeholders committee, said she was impressed by RPA’s ideas about creating a unified downtown commercial district. “I like the way they’re trying to make a center area for the town,” Gardner said. “They’re trying to bring the whole area together and make it one, instead of having separate sections. They did a great job.”