Mall makeover nears finish

New bricks are down, power is upgraded and lights are working on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, but today will not be the last time people see construction workers on the city’s adored pedestrian strip.

The four-month, $7.5 million restoration has nearly come to a close, with the replacement of almost all the mall’s bricks set to finish today apart from one spot — by the Omni Charlottesville Hotel, where some issues were discovered with the concrete slab below the bricks.

“The slab underneath, it was really bad so we had to take the whole slab out,” said Chris Weatherford, the project manager with Barton Malow Co.

City officials said in March that the project would be significantly completed by today. Though there is still work to be done near the Omni, city spokesman Ric Barrick said the rebricking there should be done by early next week.

“It’s not going to be a large delay,” he said.

Weatherford said everything apart from that section of the mall and some other small improvements — such as cleanup, putting lights in the trees and replacing about 100 bricks that cracked during construction — would stick to the timeframe. The green construction barriers that came with the project will be taken away, most of the noisy brick cutting will cease and the other small adjustments will be made during the next month.

“We’ll be continuing on until the end of May,” Weatherford said.

A temporary detour of the Charlottesville Transit Service’s free “trolley” bus will also be extended through Monday until work around the mall crossing at Second Street West is finished. During the detour, the trolley is not traveling east of the intersection at Ridge Street and McIntire Road on Water Street, or crossing the Downtown Mall. Instead, it will travel northbound on Ridge-McIntire to Market Street.

The sour economy had city officials saying as early as December that the project could possibly come in 10 percent to 15 percent under budget. Barrick said Thursday that the city still expects the project to be under budget, but a final price tag will not be tabulated until all of the improvements are finished.

“We had better competitive bidding, and also some of the amenities got cut down a little bit,” Barrick said of factors that decreased the project’s cost.

The City Council will get a report on the restoration at its Monday meeting.

As work began in the winter and much of the debate around the controversial project abated, some business owners remained skeptical that the renovations would be completed within the ambitious timeframe the city had set. Much of the disbelief stemmed from the Third Street rebricking, when original design plans for the three-month project needed to be changed after pavement had been torn up, making the project last nearly six months longer than intended.

“When they first started, I thought, no way,” said Lee Marraccini, owner of the Angelo jewelry store on the mall. But his impression changed after a little while.

“They’re doing a way better job than I thought,” he said Thursday. Now that the project is nearly done, Marraccini said he would like to see the city develop a maintenance plan for the bricks’ upkeep, as previous neglect created the need for the overhaul.

Will Soper, a waiter at the Nook, said the restaurant experienced access issues only when construction crews were directly in front of the storefront. As the project progressed, he grew more confident that it would be finished on time.

“It was only a week or so that [construction] was a big factor,” Soper said.

Weatherford said the construction crews were lucky not to have experienced much atrocious weather during the winter, apart from the occasional ice storm and early March snowfall.

“I was hopeful the weather was going to hold out,” he said. “I think we’ve been very fortunate that it’s gone smoothly.”