Residents pitch in to save Punta Gorda’s streets
In April, residents of Punta Gorda, Fla., gathered to restore a brick street in the city’s historic district. Their efforts were part of an ongoing project to replace aging sewers and, at the same time, preserve a piece of the past. In addition to saving the city money, the volunteers have engendered a sense of community pride through their labor.
Situated in the southwestern portion of the state, Punta Gorda incorporated in 1926. The small fishing village had six miles of brick streets, half of which disappeared over the ensuing decades.
By the early 1980s, Punta Gorda had become a city (today it has 16,500 residents). Only three miles of the original streets remained intact, and those were threatened as the community’s original clay sewers began to collapse and produce sinkholes.
The utility failures could not be ignored, and the city had to make the difficult choice of repairing the sewers at the expense of the brick streets. “There was little funding available,” says Rick Keeney, Punta Gorda’s public works director. The labor necessary to pull up the brick, clean it and re-lay it was costly; the city estimated that the replacement cost with brick would be $8,000 per block as opposed to $3,000 per block with asphalt.
The sewer repair proceeded across six city blocks, and, when it was complete, Punta Gorda paved the affected blocks and stockpiled the old bricks. “The community saw that it was losing its brick streets because of economics,” Keeney says. “Residents went to the council and offered to [organize] a volunteer group that would put the bricks back down for nothing.”
Although the council did not strip the newly poured street to accommodate bricks, the meetings produced the blueprint for Punta Gorda’s long-term pipeline and street replacement project. As work progressed on utility replacement (the city would replace approximately one block of sewer and water line each year), volunteers would pull the bricks and re-lay them. Together, the public works crews and residents could preserve the remaining 24 blocks of brick streets.
Punta Gorda has followed that blueprint for 10 years, and, during that time, the city and its residents have refined their project roles. “On the original project, the volunteers went in and removed every brick by hand,” Keeney explains. “There was no machinery used at all. They would go in with crowbars and shovels and remove the bricks; they’d clean them by hand; and then they would re-lay them.”
Soon, the city began using its equipment to ease the volunteers’ labor. “As time progressed, city employees would go in and help remove the brick with a front-end loader,” Keeney says. “The city would stack the bricks; volunteers would clean them and pallet them; and the city would use its loader to help place the bricks for the volunteers to lay.”
Today, the crews work like a well-oiled machine, Keeney says. “It used to take us close to a week to remove a brick street, and we’ve got it down to half a day,” he reports. “And where it used to take us two weeks to lay a brick street, it now takes us one day.” Typically, 50 to 60 volunteers participate in each project.
Punta Gorda has completed 12 blocks, and it will tackle the next block this fall. (The city schedules its work for cool, dry weather.) In addition to bringing neighbors together, the street work has inspired homeowners to refurbish their historical property, Keeney says. It also has prompted people who are building new homes and shops to adopt architecture that mimics that of the historic district.