For two summers, the walk from Long Beach Boulevard down to Riverside felt like a construction detour with a beach at the end of it. Orange cones, plywood facades, sidewalks cut into squares and taped off. Residents adjusted. You crossed earlier, you parked farther west, you stopped noticing which storefronts were vacant because most of them were.
The summer of 2026 is where that changes. The Park Avenue Resilient Connectivity Project has finished the stretch it was working on, and the leases that were signed while nothing looked ready are now open doors. This post is a walking read of what's actually different between Long Beach Boulevard and Riverside for people who already live inside that walk.
The Corner That Sat Empty for Two Years
Start at the western edge. The old Long Beach Cinemas closed in April 2023, and the corner at Park Avenue and Long Beach Boulevard sat vacant while the building was subdivided into smaller retail bays. Signs finally went up in late October 2025 when Chipotle carved out one of the new bays, becoming the first announced tenant. Other for-rent signs are still hanging in the same building, which is the more interesting piece of information if you live on this block. The corner has been redrawn as three or four tenants instead of one anchor, and only one of those slots has a name on it so far.
The old cinema footprint is being metabolized in pieces. What comes next is being decided in leasing conversations happening right now, on the same block as your grocery run.
That matters for how the western end of the corridor is going to feel by fall. A single occupied bay next to two or three unnamed ones is a very different streetscape than a fully leased corner, and residents get to watch that resolve in real time.
163 East Park, Newly Occupied
Walk east. The former Peri Peri space at 163 East Park Avenue is now Beach Bird, which soft opened in the first week of July 2026 as a second location for owner David Malinowski. The Oyster Bay original built its following on a specific technical choice: chicken that's never frozen and brined for 24 hours before it's cooked. That is the kind of detail that reads like marketing copy until you taste a tender that was made under the same rules.
Two things are worth flagging for residents. First, Beach Bird's soft opening lands in the exact stretch of July when the boardwalk is at its most saturated, which means the crowd distribution on East Park is going to shift. The blocks between Long Beach Boulevard and Edwards were already the strongest pull for a post-beach walk; a new counter-service option changes the calculus for a family debating whether to eat at the sand or after it.
Second, Malinowski told Greater Long Island the buildout ran longer than he wanted, and that neighbors kept walking in on closed-door days to ask when he was opening. That is a small data point about the corridor. Foot traffic on East Park is dense enough that a shuttered storefront gets asked about by strangers, including, according to Malinowski, a mailman who wasn't even assigned to the route.
West of the Line, Barrier's Second Taproom
The Park Avenue project is the loudest change, but it isn't the only new footprint worth knowing about. Barrier Brewing Company, based out of Oceanside, opened its second taproom in Long Beach on August 25, 2025, giving the West End a locally brewed pour that doesn't require a car. If your summer routine includes the western half of the boardwalk more than the central stretch, the Barrier taproom quietly rewrote your Friday. It's a taproom, not a restaurant, so plan accordingly, but the presence of a Nassau County craft brewer with its own outpost inside the city limits is the kind of signal that leases follow.
What the Sidewalk Actually Changed
Here is the piece that generic roundups will miss. The Park Avenue Resilient Connectivity Project wasn't cosmetic. Between Long Beach and Riverside Boulevards, the city rebuilt the sidewalks from the base up, added new street trees and street lights, and restriped the road. The city has said the finished stretch is meant to serve as the template for the rest of Park Avenue through the Central Business District.
Translation for a resident: the reason new storefronts are opening in a cluster right now is that the block finally looks like a block a tenant would sign a five-year lease on. Retail follows sidewalk width, tree canopy, and lighting at night, in roughly that order. Beach Bird, Chipotle, and the two or three still-unnamed bays in the old cinema building aren't a coincidence of timing. They're the first cohort of tenants who signed after the drawings for the new streetscape started circulating.
That reframes what you're looking at on your evening walk. You're not walking through a corridor that happened to get some new tenants. You're walking through a corridor that was rebuilt to attract them, and the rebuild worked.
The Rest of the Corridor Worth Knowing
The new arrivals sit inside an already-dense roster of Park Avenue restaurants that residents already have their opinions about. A short and non-exhaustive orientation for anyone still learning the strip:
- Felicia, 26 East Park Avenue. Small plates, wine list, dining room hours that run late on Fridays and Saturdays.
- LB Social, 62 West Park Avenue. Seasonal American, raw bar, the address most locals give when someone from off-island asks for a sit-down dinner.
- Roc & Olive, 180 West Park Avenue. Brunch-forward and booking events into 2026.
- Lost At Sea, Mareya, Zeebo's, Lost And Found, Driftwood LBNY, Borrelli's Taproom, James & Main. The current 11561 shortlist that shows up on every regional roundup, spread across both East and West Park.
None of those are new. What is new is that the corridor between them has been physically upgraded, and the gaps between them are filling with tenants like Beach Bird and Chipotle rather than staying dark.
The Summer Calendar That Rides on Top of All This
The construction finishing also lines up with the events that put the boardwalk and Park Avenue in the same weekend. The City Arts & Crafts Boardwalk Festival on July 11 and 12 runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with more than 200 vendors between Long Beach and Edwards Boulevards, which is the exact block Beach Bird now sits on. The Chamber Boardwalk Fair earlier in June and the Historical Society's fair on August 29 and 30 at Riverside Boulevard bracket the summer with the same pattern: dense boardwalk traffic looking for an after-fair meal, walking one block inland to Park Avenue to find it.
Kennedy Plaza concerts on July 20, August 3, and August 17 do the same thing on weeknights. The Free Summer Concert Series has expanded to two shows a week in rotating locations, which spreads the post-concert dinner crowd across more blocks than it used to. If you own on a side street between the plaza and the beach, you probably already noticed.
Why This Matters if You Live Here
The generic version of this post would tell you a new chicken place opened and Chipotle is coming. That's true and it's also not the story. The story is that Long Beach spent two years rebuilding a specific stretch of Park Avenue, and the tenants who signed leases against those drawings are now open, opening, or announced, all inside the same summer. The city's own project page says the finished stretch is a template for the rest of the corridor, which means what you're seeing between Long Beach and Riverside is a preview of what the blocks farther east will look like in the next round.
For residents, that's a rare thing. Most neighborhood change happens slowly enough that you notice it only in hindsight. This one is happening on a schedule you can watch, on a block you already walk. Beach Bird's soft opening this month is a data point. The still-unnamed bays in the old cinema building are the next one. The blocks east of Riverside are the one after that.
If watching this corridor shift has you thinking about what your own block, or the one you've been eyeing, is worth in the current market, Robyn Goldowski can walk you through it. Get your instant home valuation and let's start the conversation.
