A Special Kind of Blackout Courtesy of Con Ed
A distressed reader writes in with this week’s gripe against everyone’s favorite utility: Near my house on Carlton Ave, ConEd has been digging up the sidewalks. Work seems to be done, but instead of re-paving and restoring the original cement, they left this mess. Even my dog doesn’t like to walk on it! What can…
A distressed reader writes in with this week’s gripe against everyone’s favorite utility:
Near my house on Carlton Ave, ConEd has been digging up the sidewalks. Work seems to be done, but instead of re-paving and restoring the original cement, they left this mess. Even my dog doesn’t like to walk on it! What can we do?
Good question. You can be sure a homeowner wouldn’t get away with this!
In general, the sidewalk and especially pavement patching in New York is poor. Contractors are not held to any reasonable standard. I recently visited several other cities while on vacation – the pavement is patched to be smooth with barely a lip or dip, so we know it is possible to do this job right. There must be a cost to car suspensions I recently contacted the DOT in advance of a patch job on my block to ask that they monitor the patching to ensure it was level. They called back right that day to ask if I had called 311 – in other words, they were looking to solve a complaint after the fact, when I was simply saying, let’s raise standards to a reasonable level for contractors.
There was the exact same scenario at Grand and Lorimer in Williamsburg recently and within a month or so a contractor had come by to totally replace it all with standard sidewalk fare. Its actually looks far better now than it did before they started all the digging.
I live on this block of St. Marks and almost considered blogging / complaining about this same issue, but assumed it would be temporary…
I know – tear up the rest of the sidewalk and replace it with asphalt so it matches!
Equally unattractive patches in place on Lexington at Grand. Bleh.. I hope this gets fixed.
Foxy Brown is nuts… too bad, I had a crush on her when I was younger. She’s still smokin’, just completely nuts.
I’d be more worried about the RAGING FOXY BROWNS
I’m on the phone with Con Ed with the nicest guy I’ve ever spoken to at that company and he looked up my address (as we have a big patch of black tar in front of our house) and he looked up a bunch of our neighbors’ address but he couldn’t find anything for 2007. He took my name and number and said he’d have his manager contact me (I know, we’ll see). If I get any news, I’ll share it. As I told him, I’m bothered by the big patch of black tar but even more bothered by the fact that they put all the concrete they dug up into a huge, unmoveable bag and left it in the street. There are three of them on our block which means we’re down 3 parking spaces. That’s okay for a few days but not for a few weeks.
9:46 and 9:47 are right, this is standard procedure. Someone (not Con Ed, a subcontractor) will come out and replace the sidewalk. You can probably call Con Ed and (eventually) find out when it will happen.