Pothole Watch: Week 7

BY ERIKA NORTON
GOSHEN — The Goshen Plaza parking lot reached such a low point this week, the owners of the neighboring Goshen Diner paid to pave some of it — even though they don't own the lot.
Goshen Diner Manager George Tsaklanos said diner owners George and Dennis Anastasis fixed the entrance and exit, both to the strip mall and the diner, to spare their customers a front-end-rattling ride over potholes.
“As a service to the customers and the business, he got somebody to fix it because, from what I understand, the owner of the property over there by CVS, he was not really interested in fixing the problem,” Tsaklanos said.
“If you have a business in the area and you service the customers, especially the customers of the community, what would you do?” he continued. “You want to provide a service to the customers that come here, some of them have come here for so many years and a lot of them are older people too, so you don’t want them to have to drive through those potholes to come to us.”
The entrance and exit to the Goshen Plaza and the strip behind the diner were paved Tuesday. Tsaklanos said the Anastasises also plan to repave the diner parking lot this summer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Goshen Plaza parking lot remains a crumbling mess. At night, many of the lot lights are out or dim, and a number of handicapped parking signs are missing from the yellow poles in the front.
The deteriorating parking lot at the village’s only shopping center, which includes a CVS Pharmacy and several other businesses, is a perennial problem.
HistoryIn May 2015, Philip Adler and North American Properties purchased the Goshen Plaza for $7.85 million at auction, the second for the strip mall.
Goshen Plaza business owners have in the past complained that the pockmarked lot has driven away business.
In 2001, the Grand Union grocery store left the plaza, leaving the village without a supermarket to this day. CVS moved into that spot later.
When will it be fixed?In 2015, Adler and village Mayor Kyle Roddey said they planned to make the parking lot a priority. The parking lot saw some paving in September of that year, but the condition has deteriorated again.
Editor’s note: Pothole Watch will keep an eye on the situation with updates every week until the lot is repaved.