SUMMER BREAK IS OVER

Things continue to progress in the Pondcrest Phase.  Maybe the most exciting progress is that your future pool is under construction.  The foundations for the buildings in the pool area have been formed up and the plumbing and electrical are going in.  The pool itself will most likely start to be dug out in a few weeks.  I’m sure the folks working on it wish there was a pool to jump in now as it has been extremely hot working in the full sun.  

In addition to the pool, the irrigation has been going in around Albert Gary Park adjacent to the pool.  This is the park that contains the pond and accompanying dry pond.  We are wanting to get this area irrigated so that we can seed it with grass so that it has time to get established well before the fall.  The dry pond has the potential to be a really nice big open field park, which Habersham doesn’t have currently, so we’re working hard to have it nice and smooth and flat for the grass to come in on.  A Harley rake was used to do this, which helped pull all the roots and other debris that was in the topsoil out and leave the surface tilled and flat.  Pictures of that are below as well as the irrigation install.  The well for irrigation was dug several weeks ago and just finished getting installed last week.

This is a harley rake on a skid steer. It is used to remove debris from the ground and create a smooth surface for seeding grass.

You can see how smooth the harley rake is able to get the park area. It will go over it one more time now that irrigation is installed and prior to seeding.

Irrigation lines being installed in Albert Gary Park.

MotherEarth Irrigation crew reviewing plans during the installation around Albert Gary Park.

Other noticeable progress is the streetscape improvements along Cherokee Farms Road.  The last update showed what the plan was and now you are able to see what that looks like with the parallel parking spaces and curbing in.  You’ll notice the curbing drops off as you travel west, and drops off a little sooner on the north side of the road.  There is no curb where the urbanism becomes less formal and more rural.  On the north side, this happens as the linear park along Cherokee Farms Road widens as it approaches the large Live Oak tree across from Hamlet Row.  It becomes more park like.  The curb goes away first and then as the park really opens up, the sidewalk turns into a rock path through the park.  On the south side, the curb stays in tact in front of all of the multifamily housing types (i.e., condos, townhouses, apartments) and then the parallel parking is eliminated altogether with the curb as it transitions to single family cottages.  I think everyone can already see how on street parking can help slow traffic.  Even though the width of pavement hasn’t changed, the presence of something right along the shoulder makes people drive more carefully.  There is still plenty of room with Cherokee Farms having 11’ lanes (as opposed to 9’ within the neighborhood), but it feels tighter and that makes people slow down.  It’s an example of a design feature that manipulates human behavior.

Curbing is formed and ready for concrete along the intersection of Cherokee Farms Road and North Market. New parallel on street parking spaces are being formed.

Looking towards Market and the more urban section of Cherokee Farms Road where curbing is put in on both sides of the road and on street parallel parking spaces added. The new spaces, curb, and eventually street trees will visually narrow down the road, which helps reduce traffic speed.

Looking west, the curb remains on the southern side of Cherokee Farms Road along the Village Flats and Habersham Row Apartments but no curb is used on the north side of the road where it provides parking along a linear park.

You’ll also notice that a lot of work was done to extend the sidewalks on the existing Habersham side to the road.  This was very challenging because of existing grading, drain inlets, fire hydrants, trees, etc.  It would have been much easier and cheaper to just leave them as is, but the connection is important.  As the new phase gets built out, it is very important to have it connected to existing Habersham.  The best way to do this is to give plenty of clear pedestrian connections across Cherokee Farms Road.  Therefore, at each opportunity, the sidewalks coming from the south connect across to sidewalks on the north.  Even past the last street, sidewalks on Hamlet Row and Canton Row will extend across and connect to the path in the park.

The sidewalk on Assembly Row is extended all the way to the edge of Cherokee Farms Road for an eventual crosswalk that will connect over to the Pondcrest Phase of Habersham.

A sidewalk is formed up and ready for concrete. This sidewalk will form the edge of the linear carrot-shaped park along Cherokee Farms Road.

Next week, BJWSA and the engineers will be on site to begin pressure testing the water and sewer systems.  This will take several days.  We’ve discussed the requirements in previous posts, so a follow up post will be done after the testing to show what was done.

Below are a few more pictures of various things going on.

Dry utilities are finally wrapping up. A joint trench is used for power (gray) and telecommunications (orange). The two telecommunication companies that are going in are Sparklight and Brightspeed.

Here, a gas line is bored under an existing road. The boring machine is set up on the other side and slowly bores underground while a guy monitors it from above with some sort of ultrasound scanner. Eventually we watched it pop through the dirt right here in this hole, right on target.

An updated look down into the deep wet well of the pump station. All of the pipes have been installed and everything is complete. Eventually, they will fill this whole thing up with water and do a draw down test to be sure the pumps are working correctly.