Canal Street, Lower Manhattan’s famously clogged east-west artery, is getting the face-lift New Yorkers have awaited for decades — but most of the concrete work has been pushed to 2027, the city Department of Transportation told a community board committee this month, as Gothamist reported. For one of the busiest pedestrian corridors in the country, the arrival of a safer street is proceeding at the speed of its supplies.

“Anything involving concrete work is going to be pushed to the next year,” said Lauren Rennée, a deputy commissioner for the department. “We would have loved to do more.”

The department has split its Reimagining Canal Street project into two phases. The first, scheduled for this fall, targets the west side of the street, where vehicle traffic is the biggest concern: wider sidewalks, new crosswalks, two-lane bike lanes, pedestrian areas lined with planters and concrete blocks, and painted curb extensions running from the West Side Highway to Broadway. The second phase, on the east side — where most of the corridor’s famous vendors are stationed — is scheduled for 2027, with specific plans not yet announced.

The safety case for the project is stark. According to department data, 190 people were injured on East Canal Street between 2020 and 2024, and two were killed in a car crash. The east-side work is aimed squarely at walkability in the stretch where collisions happen most.

So far this fall, the visible record consists of painted curb extensions — essentially extending the pedestrian area into the shoulder — at five sites near west Canal. Construction signs are plastered across the area, but major work is hard to spot. The department insists the project remains on schedule and says more work, including planter installations, is coming in the next few weeks; anything left over rolls into next year. “We began installing Canal Street West this fall as promised and substantial progress has been made as we work around the clock to deliver these upgrades to enhance safety,” department spokesperson Mona Bruno said in a statement.

Canal Street has always been a place of contradictions — a wholesale gem district, a tourist gauntlet of knockoff handbags, a subway hub and a truck route all sharing the same four lanes. Its sidewalks, crammed past capacity at nearly any hour, have been the subject of community board petitions and redesign studies since the Bloomberg administration. The current plan, born of the city’s post-lockdown street redesign program, treats Canal as a pedestrian corridor first and a traffic sewer second — an approach already tested on 14th Street, where transit-priority corridors survived court challenges and measurably moved buses faster.

For the vendors, residents and daily cyclists who use the street, the delayed timeline has a practical meaning: at least one more holiday season of navigating the current chaos, with the promise of planters and concrete still on paper. The redesign’s fate will ultimately be judged not by press releases but by whether a person pushing a stroller can cross Canal without playing Frogger.