Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Bricks on 5th St. NE get pulled up, back in November, as a demo of the work to come.

The Downtown Mall rebricking has begun, Rachana Dixit writes in today’s Daily Progress. Beginning at Central Place, the $7.5M project will work outward from there, continuing six days a week for the next four months. The city did a legendarily terrible job working with merchants when the Downtown Mall was initially constructed, and did little better when bricking over 3rd St. last year. This time around they’re working closely with merchants, timing the work to avoid disruption, even skipping work on Saturdays, at the request of businesses. But lots of downtown merchants remain dubious of the whole project, fearful that it will be more expensive, more disruptive, and lengthier than the city has promised.

Want to follow obsessively each day’s progress? You’ve got a couple of options. There’s C-Ville Weekly’s “Brick Watch!” And there’s also, impressively, the city’s own blog dedicated to the project, complete with a Flickrstream. (Though all their photos are copyrighted, rather than being released into the Creative Commons, so I’ve had to illustrate this with an old photo of my own. That’s my sole quibble in an otherwise great effort.)