Shovels went into Westbury Avenue on Tuesday morning, and for Carle Place that sentence took 23 years to write. Crews from Stasi General Contracting broke ground on a roughly $4 million rebuild of the hamlet's main commercial corridor, from Jamaica Boulevard to Carle Road, with the whole job due back finished by May 2027.

The Carle Place Civic Association has been asking for this street since 2003. Members stood at the groundbreaking Tuesday alongside Town of North Hempstead officials, Nassau County legislators and the contracting team, watching a project that spent two decades in the talking stage finally reach the digging one.

What the street gets

This is not a repaving with a ribbon on it. The plan rebuilds the corridor end to end:

The sidewalks come out and go back in accessible form, rebuilt to be navigable for wheelchairs, walkers and strollers along the full stretch. The road surface gets repaired and resurfaced. New catch basins go in to handle the water that has long pooled along the avenue. The old streetlights give way to new lampposts with LED fixtures. And the trees are being replanted at a net gain: nearly 40 tired ones came down along the avenue, and 48 new ones go in, so the corridor ends up greener than it started.

The Town of North Hempstead awarded the construction contract to Stasi General Contracting at $3,737,276. Nassau County is putting in close to $2.5 million, and the town committed more than $1 million from its American Rescue Plan Act allocation, bringing the total project to about $4 million.

Why it took 23 years

The honest answer is a property map. Westbury Avenue itself belongs to Nassau County, while the sidewalks on either side of it belong to the Town of North Hempstead. Every meaningful fix therefore needed two governments to fund, design and schedule the same block at the same time, and for two decades that coordination never quite landed. Civic association members have described watching the avenue age year over year while requests moved between a county road department and a town public works office that each owned half the problem.

The design work that broke the logjam got moving in 2025, when the town approved the engineering contract for the corridor. The county and town money lined up behind it, the construction bid was awarded this year, and Tuesday the first crews arrived.

What it means while the work runs

A full corridor rebuild means months of cones, lane shifts and torn-up sidewalk panels on a street people use to reach the Carle Place LIRR station, the schools and the stores along the avenue. The work is phased between now and May 2027, so no single stretch should be impassable for the duration, but the corridor will look like a construction site through the winter and spring.

The payoff on the other side is the version of the street the civic association has been sketching since George Pataki was governor: continuous, level sidewalks a parent can push a stroller down, a properly drained roadway, brighter and cheaper lighting, and a tree canopy with 48 fresh trunks in it.

A hamlet that asked and kept asking

Carle Place is one of the smallest hamlets in the town, about a square mile between Westbury and Mineola, and it does not often land a multimillion dollar rebuild of its own. What it had was a civic association that kept the same request on the table through a generation of town supervisors and county legislators, until the answer changed.

For readers who drive Westbury Avenue: expect the crews, plan a little extra time, and watch the lampposts. By next Memorial Day, the street underneath them is supposed to be new.