Loranger Square city center in downtown Monroe receiving facelift
A prominent section of downtown Monroe will continue to be closed off to traffic for another few weeks.
Loranger Square, the site of the city's annual holiday tree lighting ceremony in the heart of the downtown historic district, has been closed off since the end of August due to a water main replacement on on East 1st Street. Additionally, crews are repaving the square and the rest of the block from Washington to Macomb streets, including both intersections.
"The road was in marginal shape and the curbs were really bad," said Patrick Lewis, the city's director of engineering and public services. "Along city hall and the other side of the road, the curbs were starting to become trip hazards and pieces were coming out."
The city also saw a need to replace the iconic brickwork across the square. The bricks were recovered from old roadways around the city and repurposed for the square about 40 years ago, Lewis said.
"The problem is that because they've been driven on for so long, they're not really in good enough shape," he said. "They were starting to rut and starting to get to the point where it was becoming a hazard, too."
Lewis said that very few of the bricks were salvageable and capable of being reused in the square. Instead, contractor Salenbien Trucking and Excavating Inc. of Dundee will replace the bricks with colored, stamped concrete. GM and Sons Inc. of Whitmore Lake is subcontracting on the project.
"We wanted to make sure as much as practical that we were keeping a similar look to what people are used to," Lewis said.
The cost of the project is about $760,000 with most of that money going toward repaving.
The work to replace and reconnect the water main is already concluded and repaving will take until the end of September. The street and square are expected to reopen in early to mid-October.
Another project will begin downtown in October to make improvements to the courtyard between city hall and the Monroe County Courthouse. The work includes drainage updates, repaving and landscaping redesign. Salenbien Trucking and Excavating contracted for the work at just over $420,000, the cost of which is shared between the city and the county.
"Hopefully this will complete the work around the downtown area for a while," Lewis said. "We staged these projects so that we wouldn't have multiple streets under construction in the same area. Hopefully when it's all said and done, everybody will like the look and we won't have to disrupt downtown again for quite a while."
Other largescale projects planned by the city for next year include resurfacing North Macomb Street between Grove Street and Country Club Circle. That work is expected to begin in spring 2024. Also, the city soon plans to take bids from contractors to improve the Martin Luther King Jr. bridge downtown over the River Raisin.
This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Loranger Square city center in downtown Monroe receiving facelift
