City plans ribbon cutting as West Milwaukee Street fully opens on Friday

Oct. 20—JANESVILLE — When asked what he thinks it'll be like on Friday when the scenery outside his print shop on West Milwaukee Street is finally rid of construction equipment and torn up pavement, Todd Duckworth mustered a semi-ironic joke:

"What street?"

It might be hard for some to remember that West Milwaukee actually is one of the city's major arterial streets downtown, considering that parts of the street have been closed to traffic since early spring.

And before that, there had been only a handful of months since the fall of 2018 when West Milwaukee Street was not at least partially blocked by one state Department of Transportation street construction project or another.

Most downtown city merchants blame heavy rains and a swollen river in 2018 and 2019 as the main reason why a $5.7-million project to replace the West Milwaukee Street Bridge ran several months behind schedule.

The bridge was finally replaced and has been open for more than a year, but that project's overrun compressed the timeline for the full project on West Milwaukee Street, from the Rock River west to the Five Points intersection.

Meanwhile, a global pandemic rolled along, disrupting the street and sidewalk work. Some retail store owners said they saw foot traffic fall off as much as 80 percent, while others who run service companies, like Duckworth's Minuteman Press, said they didn't see the project affect their businesses much.

Now, on Friday evening, the city of Janesville is throwing a block party for Duckworth and other merchants along West Milwaukee Street to celebrate the end of what's felt, for some, like a marathon of street work.

With the ribbon cutting Friday, the West Milwaukee Street celebration take place from 4 to 7 p.m., and will include speeches by local, state and federal officials, a classic car show, a kid's carnival and free apple cider.

Then the street will officially reopen.

Paul Murphy, a West Milwaukee Street property owner, said he's looking forward to the celebration Friday—a planned ribbon cutting at the west half of West Milwaukee Street between Jackson Street and the Five Points. That four-block-long segment has been cordoned off for replacement since July, while blocks nearer the West Milwaukee Street Bridge were replaced earlier this year and reopened to traffic by midsummer.

Murphy has retail storefront tenants along the spur that was replaced this summer. But another West Milwaukee Street property he owns, a former funeral home he's renovating into apartments just west of Janesville City Hall, is right in the thick of blocks that have been blocked to traffic for weeks.

Murphy was working fill in a trench in his future apartments' parking lot adjacent to where Rock Road had cut in a new water utility line to his parking lot's entryway.

Anyone working on street projects in Janesville this year has been boosted by unusually dry weather, unlike the spate of wet weeks in 2018 and 2019 that hampered street work.

Murphy said he believes that the West Milwaukee Street project's construction team—local design firm Batterman and local contractor Rock Road Companies—didn't just benefit from favorable weather this construction season.

Compared to contractors who worked on other, recent street tear ups in the heart of downtown Janesville, the West Milwaukee Street crew seemed to do a better job communicating day-to-day with merchants in the construction zone, according to Murphy.

For instance, he said, the team learned from observing another street replacement project along North Main Street five years ago that many downtown storefronts still have underground vaults that run out to the street that needed to be filled in.

On West Milwaukee Street, the contractor and architect worked to identify the location of all vaults before the project started last spring.

"You didn't have interruptions or suprises crop up midway through the project that you weren't prepared for," Murphy said.

He said that West Milwaukee Street's business community seemed to embrace planning ahead, too. The groups answered street closures this summer with multiple sets of artistic, hand painted directional signs that showed people how to reach blocked-off businesses on foot.

Murphy and Duckworth said that after a couple years straight of construction, merchants are looking forward to seeing no more barricades, cones, construction barrels and plastic fencing blocking off the main thoroughfare on the west side of downtown.

What's more, the project is set to wrap without any significant delays along the way.

Near a big, white banner that spans the 300 block of West Milwaukee and extolls the ongoing revitalization to parts of the thoroughfare, a landscaping crew was planting brand-new trees in the terrace on Wednesday afternoon.

Tags on the young trees listed their variety as Victory elms.

Miguel Carreon, one of the crew members, said the tree plantings are among the finishing touches to the streetscape along West Milwaukee.

Is it a victory?

"You bet," Carreon said.