Safer, More Beautiful Sidewalks for Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown

For those who walk the villages – and so many of us do – there’s good news coming to our sidewalks both aesthetically and in terms of safety in both Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown.

Sleepy Hollow Mayor Ken Wray recently signed two grant contracts for two separate improvement projects. One focuses on a tricky intersection for pedestrians – Beekman Avenue and North Washington – the other improves a stretch of sidewalk from Tarrytown to Sleepy Hollow.

The Safe Routes to School Grant the village secured for the amount of $220,000 – and requiring no matching funds – will pay for the modernization of the traffic light at Beekman and N. Washington with pedestrian crosswalks and ADA accessibility.

For this project, said Village Administrator Anthony Giaccio, "we are at the very early stages and it will take some time before we go out to bid." He estimates this work could be done in 2015.   

On the other hand, things are finally moving forward (and sooner) for a grant the village secured from the NYS Department of Transportation in 2009. By inter-municipal agreement, both villages will partake of almost a million dollars of funding from the state Transportation Enhancement Program to beautify a stretch of Broadway.

The area from Wildey Street in Tarrytown to the Sleepy Hollow Animal Hospital down and around the bend in Sleepy Hollow will see new sidewalks, new benches, lighting, curbing, historic signage, and more.

The grant awarded $732,000. The remainder of the estimated $915,000 cost will be divided proportionally between the villages, with Sleepy Hollow for the most part overseeing administration aspects of the project from securing surveys to where they are now: about to get bids.

“The project has been approved by the DOT and should go out to bid in a month or two,” Giaccio said. This project could be done as soon as the fall of 2014.