The much-awaited repaving of Sixth Street is underway.
Last spring work on installing new water mains and storm sewers got underway on Sixth Street, between Sixth Avenue and Queens Avenue. By the time the infrastructure work required underground was complete, weather conditions weren't optimal for street repaving.
Jim Lowrie, the city's director of engineering said paving was set to begin Monday. "We are doing the paving work at night."
By doing the work at night, the city hopes to minimize impacts on businesses along the Sixth Street corridor.
The project has posed problems for some of those businesses since it got underway last year. In July, construction crews hit a water main that resulted in flooding to the basement of the Old Bavaria Haus restaurant, and a week later they hit a gas line outside River's Reach Pub that forced it to shut down its kitchen during the busy lunchtime rush.
The work also took longer than anticipated because of some unexpected findings in a stretch of Sixth Street that's been home to numerous restaurants through the years. It turned out that grease had been poured down the drains, clogging the aging sewer lines.
"The underground work was prolonged. It took longer than we anticipated. That is largely because we had to replace more pipes than anticipated," Lowrie said of the grease-filled pipes.
