Closed for business
Street closure worries nearby businesses, residents

A cement truck pours its load out Thursday while A.S. Horner employees smooth the freshly poured cement while they work to permanently close off the access from Wilson Street to Maloney Avenue along 11th Street in Gallup. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff writer

GALLUP — Department of Transportation officials say the state is closing off the intersection where 11th Street meets Maloney Avenue to take care of a nagging safety concern. Some nearby business owners say it will only create new ones.

State road crews started extending the curb along Maloney, across three-way intersection between the Texaco gas station and California Chinese Fast Food, earlier this week. Transportation Department project manager Will Williams said they should finish the $50,000 project by the end of the next.

As the intersection stood, Williams said, it did “not meet any kind of safety standards.”

Williams was talking about federal standards, in particular the ones that require intersections to be a certain distance from one another. According to Williams, 11th hit Maloney too close to U.S. Highway 491.

“If you’re a semi,” he said, stopped on Maloney waiting to make a left onto 11th, “you could actually still be blocking the intersection.”

Williams said the project was a request of the city’s, a way to put an end to a dangerous turn. City officials asked the state to fold it into the reconstruction of the Munoz overpass, but the Transportation Department never got around to it then. Stan Henderson, the city’s public works director, could not be reached for comment.

But if it’s safety the city and state were worried about, Rich Wommack thinks they’ve only made things worse.

The owner of Troy’s Auto Sales, at the corner of 11th and Wilson Avenue, Wommack has a good view of the project from his office. He also sees all the cars that used to use the intersection now using the parking lot in front of the Chinese restaurant instead to get between Maloney and 11th.

“In two hours I counted 46 cars cutting across the parking lot,” Wommack said. “They’re turning it into an avenue.”

With new traffic moving across the lot in both directions, he said, “there’s going to be some fender benders, I bet.”

With all the human traffic sharing the lot, Wommack’s wife Toni predicted even worse.

“These little kids are running by — I’m talking 2-year-olds — and the cars are hauling butt,” she said.

If nothing changes, she speculated, “there’s going to be some dead people.”

Peter Soohoo, who runs the busy Chinese restaurant, shares their concern.

“They use it as a road,” he said, staring at the lot through his front doors. “They drive too fast.”

He’s also worried about what all the new traffic will do to the paving.

“Pretty soon,” he said, “they’re going to break up the parking lot.”

Jim Hutchinson, general manager of the Golden Corral at the north end of 11th, doesn’t think much of the closure either. He’s seen cars cutting across not only the Chinese restaurant’s parking lot, but across the Texaco station and the car wash next door as well.

With the usual fluctuation in patron numbers that accompanies the start of every school year, Hutchinson can’t yet say if the closure has hurt business. But he’s already had more people ask for directions to get back onto 491 or Interstate 40.

“It’s not so much getting in,” he said. “It’s getting out.”

For the first time in the two years he’s managed the restaurant, Hutchinson saw something a few days ago he’s never seen before: An 18-wheeler driving down Wilson, a narrow street running through a residential neighborhood.

“I don’t know why you’d want to divert traffic into a residential neighborhood,” he said.

Tractor-trailers aren’t supposed to drive down that road, but with 11th Street’s exit to Maloney closed, he suspects the neighborhood’s residents will be seeing more of the same.