Nobody Called Back About the Grant. The Flowers Showed Up Anyway.

"I wouldn't know how to apply."

That's what Reina Buckhout, who has run DePalma Florist on Rockaway Avenue for more than 80 years, told a reporter when asked about a village program that promised to cover most of the cost of a new storefront sign. She wanted in. As of that 2024 report, no one from the village had stopped by to walk her through the process.

Buckhout's shop sits on the stretch of downtown Valley Stream between Merrick Road and Sunrise Highway, the same half mile the Village government has been trying to reshape since 2023. If you live here and have noticed new lampposts, flower baskets, or a general sense that the avenue looks a little more cared for than it did a few years ago, you're seeing the tail end of a story that took three years to actually show up on the sidewalk.

A Program Announced in 2023

The pitch was straightforward. A grant funded through the Nassau County Office of Community Development would cover 80 percent of the cost for Rockaway Avenue businesses to redo their signage, awnings, and exterior lighting. Mayor Ed Fare called it part of a continuing effort to keep the business district active. Elissa Kyle, placemaking director for Vision Long Island, argued the point was bigger than looks: a district that invites people to linger is a district where they spend money. Sasan Shavanson, president of the Valley Stream Chamber of Commerce, agreed that fresh signage could help pull in new customers alongside the regulars.

It read like the kind of investment that changes a Main Street fast.

The Owners Who Never Got a Call

A year later, a follow-up check-in with the same businesses found something different. Diana Carillo, co-owner of Chicken Coop, a Colombian restaurant with more than a decade on Rockaway, had called the program a good offer when it launched. By 2024 she said ownership had never received guidance on how to actually apply. Mohammed Quadri, a manager at Sam's Steak and Grill, said the same: no contact. Staff at Itgen's Restaurant & Ice Cream Parlor echoed it. The Chamber of Commerce, when reporters asked about its role connecting businesses to the money, could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, at Il Corso, the Italian bakery known for its baked goods, owner Zambrano wasn't thinking much about signage at all. She was watching the price of eggs climb from roughly $20 a case to $130. A discounted facade upgrade doesn't mean much to a shop owner trying to absorb that kind of overhead. Business was fine at Il Corso because of decades of loyal customers, not because of anything the village had installed outside the door.

Here's the shape of it laid out plainly:

What's Actually Different Now

By June 2026, the picture had shifted again. In a feature on the village's economic development work, Mayor Fare pointed to the physical basics: uniform lampposts, flowers planted on every one of them, a business district he describes as walkable. A village-Chamber-County signage incentive is still active, run in conjunction with Nassau County, according to the same piece. Whatever stalled at the individual storefront level in 2024 appears to have moved forward at the streetscape level by 2026, even if the path between those two years wasn't as clean as the original announcement suggested.

There's also a second wave in motion. Valley Stream has a Downtown Revitalization Initiative Round 9 application on file with New York State as of this year, a separate and larger pool of state funding aimed at the same downtown corridor. Whatever the signage grant ultimately reaches, the village is pursuing additional state support for the work on Rockaway Avenue.

The Corridor Underneath the Signage

Some of what's changed on Rockaway Avenue has nothing to do with paint or awnings. The Village courthouse and municipal building at 195 Rockaway Avenue, vacant for years, was fully restored in 2018. Sun Valley, a mixed-use building on the corner of Rockaway and Sunrise Highway, opened in 2016 with 72 market-rate apartments sitting over a Blink Fitness gym, built on a former industrial site. More recently, the village approved a 12-unit townhouse development at 1 Wallace Court, within walking distance of the train station.

The village's own 2019 state filing flagged something else worth knowing if you walk this stretch regularly: three elevated LIRR lines cross downtown Valley Stream, and the trestles they run on create dark, dead pockets of sidewalk between the shops. That's not a cosmetic problem a new storefront sign fixes. It's the kind of structural texture that shows up in state applications and rarely makes it into a press release, which is exactly why it's worth knowing if you're trying to understand why some blocks of Rockaway still feel emptier than others, regardless of how new the lampposts are.

The Fixture That Didn't Wait on Any of This

One thing on Rockaway Avenue never depended on a grant program landing on schedule. The village's annual car show has drawn a steady line of vehicles down the avenue for years, becoming one of downtown's most reliable draws regardless of what was happening with signage money. The impulse to shut the street down for a single day of organized activity isn't new either. Back in 2012, a group of Rockaway business owners and residents, including Sip This owner David Sabatino, put together the first Valley Stream Community Fest, closing the avenue between Sunrise Highway and Merrick Road for an afternoon of vendors, live music, and children's activities meant to show off the corridor's mix of cultures in one place.

That earlier festival happened well before any signage grant existed. The annual car show remains a friendly reason to walk the avenue and stop into the shops along it.

Change on Rockaway Avenue between 2023 and 2026 took more than one route. Buckhout kept DePalma Florist open, Zambrano kept Il Corso going through a steep jump in egg costs, and the village added uniform lampposts and flowers along the avenue while pursuing further state funding through the Downtown Revitalization Initiative. If the avenue looks better to you this year than it did three years ago, a lot of hands, public and private, had a part in that.

If you're curious what a corridor like Rockaway Avenue means for home values nearby, or want to talk through what's changing in downtown Valley Stream before you buy or sell close to it, reach out to Kathleen Evangelista and the Evangelista Team. We keep track of this stretch the way a neighbor would, not just the way a listing sheet does.