Fishkill / Teller Avenues Project Kicks Off in Beacon

Road reconstruction has been planned for decades

George may be gone, but it’s not for good. 

City contractors on Thursday (June 27) removed the George Washington bust from its island at Teller and Wolcott avenues in Beacon as they prepare to reconstruct the tricky intersection. The monument will be stored at the city’s highway garage while the intersection is rebuilt as a “T” in the coming weeks to improve visibility and pedestrian and driver safety.

Once complete, the bronze monument will be installed with landscaping on the north side of Teller. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed it at the intersection in 1999 to mark the bicentennial of Washington’s death. 

The move is one of the first visible changes to come as part of a 14-month, $9 million project to rebuild Teller and Fishkill Avenue, as it’s known north of Main Street. The nearly mile-long stretch from Teller and Wolcott to Fishkill and Blackburn Avenue, near Ron’s Ice Cream, will be repaved, with sidewalks along the corridor to be rebuilt and widened to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Storm drains will be replaced. The traffic signal at Main Street will have a leading interval installed to give pedestrians time to enter the crosswalk before vehicles are given a green light. Lanes for turning onto Main will be improved for trucks negotiating the tight intersection.

A handful of parking spaces will be added on Fishkill Avenue between Main Street and Verplanck Avenue. Crosswalks will be rebuilt and “speed tables” — flat, raised traffic-calming devices — will be installed near Ron’s Ice Cream, where vehicles coming from Main can have trouble seeing pedestrians. 

The project is expected to be complete by August 2025. 

The work was scheduled to begin in 2023, but contractors’ bids were nearly twice as high as the $7 million the city had budgeted. However, the project actually dates back further than last year — much further. 

City officials began cobbling together funding to repave the thoroughfare just after the turn of the century. In June 2001, the City Council approved spending $170,000 for design work on the Teller Avenue stretch. Later that year, the Fishkill Avenue segment was added. 

It’s difficult to trace the starts and stops since then, but by the economic downturn of 2008, the work had been put on a back burner. Mayor Lee Kyriacou, who served nine terms on the City Council, recalled “more than a couple of times being informed that we were working on it. It was always in the background.”

City Administrator Chris White said that when he was hired at the end of 2020, the city still needed to acquire easements from about three dozen property owners for the ADA-compliant sidewalks. Anthony “Zep” Thomaselli, who retired as highway superintendent in 2017, stepped forward. “He knew a lot of people and worked with the right-of-way acquisition company to get the necessary paperwork and get things filed,” White said.

By late 2022, with the rights-of-way secured, the city was primed to start work. But when the bids came in high, White shortened the project from the Town of Fishkill line to Blackburn. He also removed $1 million for granite curbs and secured $2 million in federal transportation aid through Dutchess County. 

Reporter Jeff Simms drove the length of Fishkill and Teller Avenues from Blackburn Avenue to Wolcott to show the route of the $9 million in improvements planned in Beacon. (The video speed has been accelerated.)

With a budget of $9 million — and 95 percent of it coming from state and federal sources — the city put the project out to bid in the spring. This time the bids came in low, leaving White about $800,000 to “see how much more sidewalk I can buy” toward the Fishkill line. 

The City Council had already authorized $1.2 million to replace a sewer line beneath Fishkill Avenue, and the city penciled $1 million into its capital pipeline to replace a century-old water line along the same stretch. The council is expected to vote on the expenditure next month. 

Once the water and sewer are upgraded, White said the city has funding to pave the final segment next year. That would mean “we get back to the original scope of work, plus some.”

Contractors are scheduled to work weekdays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Traffic will be disrupted at times, but city officials expect the road to be reasonably clear for end-of-day congestion. When the project is complete, White predicts a significant upgrade. 

“When you think about how the rest of the city now looks, this corridor was an outlier,” he said. “This is going to be transformative.”