Businesses Go Dark on Park Avenue

Several stores in the heart Long Beach’s business district lost both power and a day of sales earlier this week.

According to Mark Gross, director of communications for Long Island Power Authority, about 16 business on Park Avenue lost power due to an underground transformer that failed at about 7 a.m. Thursday.

“Because this was a lengthy job, LIPA hooked the affected businesses up to a generator, which was monitored and refueled by LIPA overnight,” Gross wrote in an email to Patch on Friday. “At 8 a.m. this morning LIPA took an intentional outage to disconnect the generator, complete the repairs and hook those customers back up to the LIPA system. Power was fully restored at 10:30 a.m.”

But Mitchell Matza, owner of Bi-Wise Drugs, said he lost power at about 9 p.m. Wednesday, and that the businesses affected ran from his store at 26 W. Park Avenue to Burger King at East Park Avenue and Edwards Boulevard. He said electricity returned to his business at about 3 p.m. Thursday, when LIPA hooked up its generator, but then he twice lost power for about an hour or more until it was fully restored late Friday morning.

“These things happen I guess, but business was wiped out for the day,” Matza said. “Today again we were down until about noon. Today we had to catch up but it was a little busy, thank God.”

A manager at Gino’s, at 16 Park Ave., said that employees at the pizzeria heard the transformer blowup Wednesday evening.

“Some of my employees heard a loud pop from the back,” said the manager, who declined to give his name.

He said that while the pizzeria used its own generator, the majority of the power was out until 3 p.m. Thursday, after which it was fully restored.

“So we weren’t able to open up yesterday until about 4 p.m.,” he said.