NORTHAMPTON — Later this month, Main Street will undergo temporary changes to help ready it for a socially distant world.
Last week, the city announced it was awarded nearly $200,000 in grant funding from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Shared Streets and Spaces program to improve the downtown area. The money will go toward expanding open space and making it safer for activities such as walking, biking and outdoor dining.
Earlier in the summer, the city put up concrete barriers on the lower part of Main Street to allow for outdoor dining and more space to walk.
“It’s basically the same thing in a much larger geographic area,” Wayne Feiden, director of planning and sustainability, said of the new initiative. “We’re also going to put in a bike lane as part of it and more pavement painting.”
Artists Eben Kling, Sean Greene, Kim Carlino and Andrae Green will work with volunteers to paint open spaces on the pavement, but the design has not yet been announced.
Parts of Main Street will be narrowed to one lane in each direction to create the open space, according to Feiden.
In recent weeks, many residents and visitors have complained that people downtown and elsewhere in the city — in parks and on bike paths, for instance — are not wearing masks. The city has heard those complaints, Mayor David Narkewicz said Wednesday. In addition to increasing signage about mask rules, the Health Department has hired a new staffer to work on COVID-19 rule compliance, such as enforcing mask rules outdoors and other precautions at businesses. A key function of the new position is a focus on educating people about masks, according to Narkewicz. Health Department staff were trying to respond to issues like mask compliance, Narkewicz said, but they are also also tasked with contact tracing and a lot of other COVID-19 work.
“Mostly as always, [we’re] just trying to express the importance of face coverings,” Narkewicz said. “Now we’ve got a lot of data to support how important it is in preventing the spread.”
Narkewicz is holding a Zoom town hall meeting on Thursday at 9 a.m. with other city officials to answer questions about the changes to upper Main Street.