Broadway Street open after construction, but some businesses say problems remain

TOLEDO, Ohio —

After months of one-way traffic and closures, the city of Toledo is celebrating the reopening of Broadway Street.

“I’m really excited that it’s done,” said Jonathan Ruiz, owner of La Paloma Pastries, a business on the street. “We are getting more people in. I’ve seen customers coming in that I have not seen in months, which is really good.”

But that good comes after a lot of bad, according to Ruiz.

“It was difficult, very difficult,” he said. “We knew it was coming, so we did try to plan ahead, but obviously we didn’t know it was going to go as long as it did.”

Ruiz says the store wasn’t able to get orders delivered because of the construction and had to keep finding different ways to get products, while also paying more for them.

The city of Toledo did offer impacted business owners grants to help with expenses. While Ruiz is grateful for what he got, he said that money only took care of a fraction of the losses the business had.

“We had instances where we would have full pots, a few 100 pounds of meat on the stove at one time cooking and the gas would go out or the water and we have to toss everything,” Ruiz said. “We can’t do nothing with it and we close up for the rest of the day.”

Just down the street, Be Youtiful Salon also took a hit.

“It really impacted us a lot,” owner Sonya Swain said. “We lost a stylist just because there were just not a lot of parking in our direction.”

She said her stylists would even go to pick up clients down the street and bring them to the salon.

Swain said the impacts are still being felt and that the shop lost parking from the road reconstruction adding a bike lane.

“The reason why I bought this building was for on-street parking, because that was a big deal to have,” Swain said. “You’ve got to have parking for your clients and your stylists.”

Swain said she reached out to the city about the lack of parking.

A city spokesperson told WTOL 11 the project was designed to balance the needs of businesses and drivers with those of people walking and biking, and they believe the final design provides good access for customers and a safer environment.

While the worst may be behind these business owners, they hope the city learns from this project.

“The thing that I hope they do in other neighborhoods when they do this construction is communicate better,” Swain said.