2021 Update #7

Back to Work

The Highlights

• Triangle Park and Lazarus Park take center stage

• Updating other Middlebury construction projects

As you undoubtedly noticed if you were in town during the day this week, the final five months of the Downtown Rail & Bridge Project got underway on schedule with a flurry of activity in Triangle Park and across the street in Printer’s Alley.

For weeks now we’ve been looking ahead to what will happen this year. Now we can start reporting what is happening.

Let’s start in Triangle Park, where a nine-person crew from our concrete subcontractor Waters Excavation Inc. out of Perkinsville VT picked up where they left off late last Fall. One of the first tasks is to form and pour the second sidewalk that will traverse the park from Merchants Row to Main Street and form the boundary between hardscape and green space.

The photo below shows one of those sidewalk panels being poured on Wednesday. The illustration that follows shows the location of that sidewalk in the finished park. Waters expects to finish pouring concrete in Triangle Park as early as the end of next week.

Over in Printer’s Alley, the Kubricky crew removed the asphalt walkway connecting Main Street and the Marble Works and put in place a temporary compacted gravel walkway while they prepare the area for the construction of curbs, sidewalks, and roadway. Please watch your step on the temporary walkway.

As shown in the next photo below, Waters has begun laying the granite curb for either side of the roadway that will take motor vehicles into the Marble Works from Main Street. That roadway was closed in Summer 2017 and will reopen this summer. (The temporary walkway is to the right in the photo.)

On Friday or early next week, Kubricky will excavate for the retaining wall that will surround the stone paver labyrinth funded by St. Stephen’s. I think we’re going to see Lazarus Park and the new Printer’s Alley take shape pretty quickly this Spring.

Our friends from ECI have been assigned the task of constructing the concrete cap walls that will form the top surface of the U-walls north of Main Street. We’ll see that work begin toward the middle of next week.

Rounding out the subcontractor agenda, Landshapes out of Richmond VT will return to Middlebury toward the end of the month to continue installing granite pavers and landscaping the new parks.

Other Construction News

Work on the Amtrak Rail Platform project will begin the week of April 19, as will the VTrans project to repave our downtown state highways. That project is now scheduled to begin on the south end with coarse milling of Route 7 between Creek Road and Cross Street, all done at night between 7 PM and 6 AM.

And finally, on the Court Street water main project, The Belden Company is testing the temporary water line it has been installing. Once that’s cleared and ready to go, we’ll see an uptick in construction on the section of Route 7 between Court Square on the north and Cross Street on the south.

More details to come on all of these projects next week.

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.