Colors aren't just for leaves

While Middletown trees are putting out their best color, Main Street has also been getting a new look.

Look around this week, and you'll see new flower planters in the North End, autumn-themed banners on light poles, and brick-pattern crosswalks on much of Main. The DBD's Main Street Manager Marie Kalita Leary and our city's Public Works and Planning departments deserve much of the credit. Here's the story:

Planters

Years ago, the Downtown Business District put concrete planters on Main Street. Each Spring they start with pansies, moving to marigolds, begonias and grasses for Summer, and mums for Fall. During the holidays, downtown florists do seasonal arrangements. The locally-grown landscape specialists at Buds & Blossoms (Stonepost Gardens on Randolph Road) do the plantings and maintenance.

You might have noticed that the planters didn't go all the way up to St. John's - they were only located within the special taxing district. The DBD doesn't cover much of the North End of Main Street, because the property owners in that area voted against the tax.

Over the past year, Main Street Manager Marie Kalita Leary worked with Michiel Wackers at the city's Planning Department to develop a CDBG* proposal for planters in the North End. This year, the Citiziens Advisory Committee approved the funding, as a way to improve business conditions in the neighborhood.

Sixteen new planters went in this week, just in time for mums season.

Banners

The DBD has been planning to put banners up on Main Street for a while now, but the return of graphic designer and signmaker Becky Hubbard to Middletown put the idea on the front burner. Becky created several of the more interesting signs on Main Street - like Esca and It's Only Natural Market. She's opened a new sign business at the top of Ferry Street, taking advantage of a lower level space in the building that also houses Feng's Place. Check out her cool front door!

Becky designed the banners, which say "Downtown" and "Middletown", and several donors stepped forward to ensure that the banners would cover not just the DBD, but the whole of Main Street. Fourteen extra banners were funded, thanks to donations from North End businesses, including Harding Development, Community Health Center, Liberty Bank, Eli Cannons, Create, Green Street Arts Center, and NEAT.


The banners will come down in the holiday season, and go back up next Fall. Thanks especially go to Fire Chief Gary Ouellette and his staff at the Alarms Division -- they put the banners on the poles.

Crosswalks

It's true that traffic has been a little thick on Main Street recently, as the paving of Washington St. to the South Green got delayed by rainy days. This is just a warning that there might be a few more days of congestion as the new brick-patterned crosswalks go on top of the new pavement.

This idea got its start a few years ago - the Planning Office suggested that highlighting the crosswalks was a way to make downtown more pedestrian-friendly. The business community loved the idea and by the time the Main Street paving project was in the planning phase, the new crosswalks were at the top of the wish list. People brought in photos of similar treatments from Manchester, Hartford and Salem, Mass. Public Works Director Billy Russo was happy to find a design that doesn't involve actually sinking pavers into the road - because those would be high-maintenance during plowing season.



Here's how it works:

The contractor lays out the lines for the crosswalks and puts down a sheet of brick-colored pigment - then the surface is heated and scored, etching the brick pattern right on the road while fusing the color into the asphalt. A reflective layer is applied to make the crosswalks more visible at night. The textured surface not only keeps drivers aware of the crosswalks, it also makes things easier for visually-impaired pedestrians.

The only down side is that the brick-pattern crosswalks won't be in the North End until the city can persuade the D.O.T. to allow them to do the work on the state-owned portion of Main Street (that's everything north of Washington St.) Hopefully, the delay for the crosswalks won't be too long, because the planters and banners are both sending the message "It's One Main Street", while the crosswalks don't. But let's count the glass as half-full, not half-empty!

Thanks to the good work of many in our downtown, it's been a good week for Main Street!





Disclosure: I'm a member of the DBD board of commissioners.


*CDBG stands for Community Development Block Grant - that's the funding that the federal department of Housing and Urban Development sends to Middletown every year, in the neighborhood of a half-million dollars. The Citizens Advisory Committee recommends how the city should allocate the grant awards.