East Campus will be getting a facelift courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Transportation in July 2010.
As part of project B-3638, the NCDOT will replace the Main Street bridge, known as Bridge No. 316, that crosses over Campus Drive. The tunnel under the bridge is a hotspot for student graffiti murals.
Project Engineer Doug Taylor said the project will necessitate removing and rebuilding approximately 500 feet of the East Campus wall.
"We don't know exactly how much we are going to take down, but it's going to be rebuilt to look similar to what's there," he said. "That's why we're working with the campus on that, because they might have [a contractor] they want to work with who they worked with before."
University Architect John Pearce said the campus will lose part of its wall because the new bridge will be widened to meet transportation standards.
Bridge 316 has to be replaced according to its NCDOT sufficiency rating, Taylor explained. The NCDOT inspects bridges annually and rates them according to structure and function from 0 to 100. When a bridge such as the Main Street bridge scores below 50, it must be replaced, he said.
Preliminary costs for the replacement, excluding the appraisal of the wall, are $975,000, Taylor said. This project, however, qualifies for funding under the federal govenrment's Highway Bridge Replacement and Rehabilitation Program, which will provide 80 percent of the funding, he added.
Replacing Bridge 316 is expected to take 18 months rather than the typical year to complete, partly due to the extended period for rebuilding the wall, Taylor said. Construction will force Main Street traffic travelling between Broad Street and Gregson Street to detour--probably onto the Durham Freeway, he said.
The wall, a gift from Benjamin Duke, was built in 1916 by Trinity College and the city of Durham to beautify the neighborhood, according to the University Archives.
"Ben Duke got his wall, and it's out there, and if you've looked at it, it's made of stone," Pearce said. "Parts of the wall will be replaced up into where the bridge actually has to be built. that doesn't look like the Ben Duke wall, but we also did not get one of those standard metal guard rail type railings.... We got something that's in accordance with DOT standards and is agreeable to us."
Taylor said if the University decides to hire a specific contractor, the NCDOT will pay Duke the damages for the wall. Otherwise, the NCDOT will auction the project to its contractors.
Duke has not yet decided whether it will select a contractor, Pearce said.
Wesley Parham, assistant transportation manager for the city of Durham, said although the city wants to see the "integrity and history" of the wall maintained, it is not involved in the decision-making process.
"The city is sort of neutral on that, but we support the project moving forward," Parham said.
Duke does not have plans for diverting its own traffic, including any changes to the C-2 bus route, which is the only University bus route to cross over the bridge, Pearce said. Although the project will not change the design of the much-graffitied Campus Drive tunnel beneath it, Pearce said there is basically nowhere to divert Campus Drive traffic should it be disrupted.
"I actually don't know whether the busing people really know about this project," Pearce said. "I'm not sure anyone at Duke really knows about this project because it's not really on any Duke burners because it has just been about the wall."
Pearce said the NCDOT is currently working on a final memorandum of agreement-an internal agreement that must be acceptable to the University and Durham, which are parties of the discussions but not members of the memorandum.
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