By Gloria Stravelli
Broadwalk, which opened last summer, will soon return to Red Bank to give eateries and shops a chance to attract diners and shoppers.
RED BANK – Within a few weeks, a stretch of the Broad Street commercial corridor will again be transformed with the addition of dining tables, planters and vintage-style lights strung overhead to create an area for casual outdoor dining.
Unlike last year, the changes won’t be driven by an all-out attempt to sustain local eateries reeling from a pandemic lockdown. This time, the “Broadwalk” is proof that a community can pull together through a worldwide calamity – and rise.
“We’re doing it again!” Laura Kirkpatrick, RiverCenter executive director, said this week, announcing plans for the return of this collaborative effort between the borough and the business community to support local restaurants and offer a safe and pleasant outdoor dining experience.
“It worked. Red Bank had a fantastic summer because we had this open pedestrian plaza for outdoor dining,” she said. “We’re working on fine-tuning some things we did last year, looking at what worked, what didn’t, looking at some areas to improve.
“We were creating it as we went along last year. This was unprecedented territory but the goal was to get the businesses open and get them viable,” Kirkpatrick said.
She noted that some businesses other than retailers also took advantage of the sidewalk space, including A Time to Kiln studio and two women’s clothing stores, which had clothing displays outside.
“We’ll be putting together something and certainly the Red Bank Borough Council has to authorize the closure of the street. We’re fortunate that section of the road is local… We’re proposing to close from West Front to White Street, which is what we closed last year,” she said.
Kirkpatrick described the safety measures taken at every step of planning and creating the Broadwalk environment, such as keeping seating 6 feet apart and the use of barriers like plants, planters and concrete blocks to delineate dining areas. Many of these measures are included in the recently released “Outdoor Opening Guide-Spring 2021,” a new Monmouth County guide to safe, innovative outdoor dining formats that introduces terms that may be new to some, such as “streateries.”
Plans for Broadwalk evolved from the shutdowns imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic last spring. Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency in New Jersey March 9, 2020, and a statewide curfew was declared March 16, closing casinos, gyms and movie theaters and limiting restaurants and bars to delivery and takeout only. On March 21, a statewide stay-at-home order was imposed mandating the closure of all nonessential businesses.
The introduction of outdoor dining turned out to be a lifeline for many businesses.
George Lyristis, owner of Bistro at Red Bank on Broad Street, said a phone call from a Red Bank councilman helped spur the advent of outdoor dining.
“It was when all the restaurants had no indoor dining permitted,” said Lyristis, who is a member of the Red Bank Business Alliance. “Councilman Hazim Yassin called me and said, ‘What do we need to do, how can the town help the restaurants?’
“We were just doing takeout. I said you have to pass laws that allow us to open up on the street. They moved very quickly to close down Broad Street. If you can’t be inside, you have to be outside, so you shut down the street,” Lyristis said.
From that phone call came an ad hoc Red Bank Reopens committee, according to Kirkpatrick. “The idea was to reopen businesses and give customers a chance to be safe and be socially distant.”
The closing of part of Broad Street – which RiverCenter dubbed Broadwalk – happened the second weekend in June. After an initial trial on Monmouth Street which “wasn’t successful,” Kirkpatrick said, RiverCenter changed course and found the borough was willing to close Broad Street, from Front Street to White Street fulltime.
According to Lyristis, outdoor dining is a natural fit for Broad Street and helped counter the isolation imposed by the pandemic.
“That area has so many eateries it just made sense. There are enough places to put all the tables and chairs,” said Lyristis.
“We started feeling comfortable being outside. We were just giving people hope,” he said.
Lyristis said hope even came in the form of music, with the national anthem being played some nights. “We wanted to bring back life to the downtown and we did.”
While business did not take off immediately, he said, it gradually built back up.
“People were still scared, we had to show them they were 6 feet apart. Every step was a learning curve and people were hesitant. We opened for takeout, then opened outdoors, then a percentage indoors. Business started to come back. We were lucky to have great support from customers.”
Lyristis, who owns three other restaurants, does not underestimate the impact of the Broadwalk.
“The difference is I would have lost all four of my businesses by the time they gave us indoor dining,” he said. “It was a lifeline. What the Red Bank Council gave us was a lifesaver. Whether you were in the business district or not, you were still able to participate. And the influx of people gave a resurgence to Red Bank.”
“The idea was to reopen businesses and give customers a chance to be safe, be socially distant,” said Kirkpatrick. While initially Broad Street closed to traffic only on weekends, she said, “It just seemed to make sense to close it 24/7, so we made that change. For anybody outside of the Broadwalk area we offered the opportunity to expand out to their sidewalks or onto the street.”
Kirkpatrick said moving seating street-side raised some concerns related to traffic and parking, so concrete blocks were purchased to delineate dining areas.
“RiverCenter and the Red Bank Business Alliance worked together to get the blocks into town,” she said. “Remember, last year there was no indoor dining at all. So it was important to get these businesses open as much as we could, to make them viable.”
“We worked with the borough public works staff, who were phenomenal, to get the blocks placed in front of many locations in town last June,” said Kirkpatrick. “As we completed the first one, the restaurant was putting out tables and we had somebody waiting to sit down before it was even set up!”
RiverCenter also helped those restaurants not in the Broadwalk area set up individual strEATERIES safely. “We did that at Red Tank Brewing and Jamian’s. They’re next door to each other on Monmouth Street. Buona Sera did their own, as did Danny’s,” Kirkpatrick said. She noted that Semolina on White Street was “a little bit of a challenge” due to the construction on the street last year, “but we made it work.”
RiverCenter also paid for the final decorative touch: the vintage-looking strings of Edison lights that illuminate both Broadwalk and the strEATERIES.
Small issues that arose last year were easily addressed, Kirkpatrick said, like picking up trash more often, and they are in the process of fine-tuning Broadwalk for its imminent opening.
Kirkpatrick said she tapped the county Division of Planning for expertise in making the Broadwalk concept a reality last year and now Broadwalk is featured on the cover of the new outdoor dining guide.
“They certainly looked at what we’re doing,” she said.
Before the county introduced the guide, finding information on how to create safe, shared outdoor public spaces for dining on sidewalks and streets proved challenging, she said. She reached out to discuss those concerns with Dave Schmetterer, assistant director of the county planning division, and a Red Bank resident.
“We talked in late summer about some of the concerns we had here in Red Bank, not so much with the Broadwalk, but with the strEATERIES, the shared outdoor public spaces for restaurant patrons dining on sidewalks and in the streets,” she said. “We talked about ADA access, we had discussions about how we could do this safely.”
She said while she found information, nothing “really fit Red Bank. I shared my frustration that there wasn’t anything that dealt with the Monmouth County experience.”
Kirkpatrick said the reopening guidance document created by the planning board deals with “sidewalks, courtyards and alleys” among other areas and items relevant to Red Bank.
Kirkpatrick praised the guide, produced by the planning board.
“The county document is really the best practices of creating strEATERIES and other things. They give some great diagrams,” she said. She also noted that the guide will be a great resource as Red Bank businesses apply for ’20-’21 outdoor dining permits.
“So it’s nice to have something that’s homegrown that we can use.”
The guide “was an ask from Red Bank,” she said, and “they answered the call.”
With the business alliance providing insight to county planners about what worked and what was frustrating, they were able to develop guidance on design for safety and access.
“All the credit goes to the county planning board.”
The Spring Outdoor Reopening Guide-2021 is an illustrated 33-page guide drawn from multiple locales with illustrations and a vision statement. It is available on the county website at visitmonmouth.com.
This article originally appeared in the March 18, 2021 print edition of The Two River Times.
