2021 Update #24

Repaving Merchants Row, Main Street, Marble Works

The Highlights

• New end date for the project

• Milling and paving schedule for central downtown

• New sidewalk for Seymour Street

If you had an opportunity to stop by St. Stephen’s Peasant Market on Saturday or to attend Festival on the Green’s evening concerts this week, you probably noticed that our downtown construction project is drawing ever closer to the finish line.

VTrans has extended that finish line by three weeks, to the Tuesday after Labor Day, to account for revisions to the construction plan that impacted the work schedule. Lazarus Park’s complicated grades required fine-tuning in the field, for example.

Much of the work that will take place during the project’s final two weeks will involve removing the access road along Otter Creek and restoring the berm that will protect the rail line from flood events.

In the meantime, the next couple of weeks will see a significant push around town to complete work in progress.

Repaving Central Downtown

A key item on the to-do list is the milling and paving of downtown roadways that have borne four years of construction. This work is separate from the repaving of our state highways that has been taking place around town for the past several weeks.

Here’s what we’ll be looking at over the next two weeks.

Merchants Row and the Battell driveway will be milled on Wednesday, August 11, and paved on Tuesday, August 17.

Milling will take place during the day so Merchants Row will be closed to motorists on the 11th and all parking coned off the night before. Sidewalks will remain open and all businesses accessible. Paving will take place starting about 6 PM on the 17th and Merchants Row will be closed to motorists for that as well.

Main Street, between Merchants Row and Seymour Street, will be milled during the day on Thursday, August 12, and paved at night on Monday, August 16.

As has been the case many times in recent months, Main Street will be limited to alternate lane traffic while milling takes place during the day on the 12th. Main Street will be paved overnight on the 16th, also with alternating lane traffic.

The Marble Works roadways have weathered four years of construction vehicles and so Kubricky will be milling and repaving all of the roadways in the Marble Works. In order to minimize disruption to the Marble Works businesses, milling will take place overnight on Friday, August 13, and paving the following Wednesday, August 18, also at night.

The one-block stretch of Water Street between Mary Johnson and Otter Creek will be paved the week of August 16 as will the National Bank’s Seymour Street drive and parking lot, which Kubricky is currently repairing.

Once paved, our downtown roadways will be striped for parking. As striping takes place, you’ll notice that ACTR’s downtown bus stop in front of the Post Office is being relocated to the northbound lane of Main Street alongside Triangle Park, a safer spot for picking up and discharging passengers downtown.

Your Weekly Construction Update

The north end of the project has been active this week. Our first photo shows Waters installing concrete curb before forming and pouring a new sidewalk between the National Bank’s Seymour Street branch and County Tire.

To the right of the photo, the Lafayette crew is installing the powder-coated steel railing fence atop the north cap wall. In total, by project’s end Lafayette will have installed nearly 3,000 linear feet of railing. That works out to more than 400 panels, each about seven feet long.

It was another quiet week at the rail platform while Kubricky awaits delivery of the platform’s canopy.

In Triangle Park, as shown in our next photo, Waters set in place the marble surround for the fountain. Then, on Wednesday, the base and water basin of the fountain itself arrived, repaired and repainted.

Waters expects to install the fountain next week and we’ll do a test run before officially turning the fountain back on at our August 21 dedication ceremony for Lazarus Park that we discussed last week.

We’ll wrap up our weekly tour on Merchants Row, where Kubricky has now completed the south cap wall.

As you can see in our final photo, the south U-walls are now being backfilled by a machine known as a “tele-belt,” affectionately referred to in the field office as a Teletubby. Next up: Lafayette will reinstall the railing fence and then Landshapes will re-landscape the area along the Battell drive.

That’s all for today. See you downtown.

Please keep your comments and questions coming. Send me an email at jgish@townofmiddlebury.org and I’ll try to cover it in my next update.