Maplewood Township will be milling and repaving the entire 1.5-mile length of Springfield Avenue starting next Monday, September 22, through Friday, September 6, and then again on Monday, September 29.
The street will be paved east to west, with closure areas changing daily as the work moves westward. The road work will be taking place during daylight hours.
Township Administrator Patrick Wherry announced the dates at the Township Committee meeting on September 16, and said that local residents should be on the lookout for detour signs and follow the Township’s social media channels for updates on closures.
“The daily paving will result in full road closures, and so we’ll have detours during that time. We are coordinating with New Jersey Transit and have set up a meeting with the School District, the police department in Maplewood, as well as in Irvington and Union, to coordinate those detours, which are pretty extensive,” said Wherry.
Township Committee member Deb Engel asked that the Township coordinate closely with the South Orange-Maplewood School District due to the fact that the District has already been experiencing issues with delayed buses.
Mayor Nancy Adams noted that the school district is closed Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 23-24, for the Jewish holidays: “So that’ll help a little bit.”
Wherry said that signs are planned to be up by September 17 to alert those traveling on Springfield Avenue.
He also reported that planned road work for next week on Valley Street by New Jersey American Water is being postponed so as not to coincide with the Springfield Avenue closures. NJ American Water is replacing lead and galvanized steel lines throughout the township. The work started in April and is expected to be completed by February/March 2026.
“They made a lot of progress [but] we’ve asked them to reduce the number of work zones” from five areas to three, said Wherry. “We’ve asked them to reduce the number of crews just because there was a lot of work going on in town and we know that had an impact on the traffic in town.”
Engel asked if NJAW would be working in commercial areas through the holiday season. Wherry said that work on Springfield Avenue was completed and he believed the same was true for Maplewood Village. Engel asked that Wherry check on the Ridgewood Row area.
“We saw the effect that it’s had on our Springfield Avenue businesses and we don’t want it to permeate to the rest of the town,” said Engel.
