The owners of a burned-out McDonald’s in Ephrata plan to soon begin tearing down the old restaurant and building a new one that could be open by mid-July.
The McDonald’s at 140 N. Reading Road in the Cloister Shopping center was destroyed by a fire last June.
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Locator map with the Highland Park neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania highlighted. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
City and neighborhood leaders envision a dramatic transformation of the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium’s parking lot and surrounding areas into a park-like expanse including a soccer field and a trail that would extend from Morningside all the way to the Allegheny River.
City Council this month approved the first installment of funding for planning what would be a multimillion-dollar project, which has the backing of Highland Park and Morningside neighborhood leaders and the zoo.
The Heth’s Run Ecological and Recreational Restoration Project, more than a decade in the making, will encompass about a mile of city-owned land from Heth’s Run Playfields behind Chislett Street in Morningside to the Allegheny riverfront.
The project includes a wheelchair-accessible trail through the wooded valley adjacent to the fields into a former city Department of Public Works storage yard and abandoned dumping ground behind the zoo’s parking lot. The paved trail will hug the outer edge of the parking lot, loop under the new Heth’s Run Bridge being built on Butler Street and out to the riverfront.
Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Lancaster County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“I was hoping the bridge would be open,” Robert Haehnle said. “I didn’t think I’d be the first car.”
But Haehnle happened to time it just right. He was the first motorist to cross the new Lititz Pike bridge — officially, the Thaddeus Stevens Bridge — when PennDOT opened it to southbound traffic about noon Wednesday.
Haehnle, a retired civil and environmental engineer who lives with his wife in Brethren Village, said he was on his way to Water Street Mission to have lunch with a man he mentors there.
He goes into Lancaster fairly regularly, so the construction has been a bother, he said. The congestion led to his being hit in a fender-bender about a month and a half ago.
Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Dauphin County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Just like Harrisburg area commuters, the local trucking industry is being inconvenienced by the shutdown of I-81 and Route 322, but it hasn’t been hamstrung by the subsequent delays.
Trucking executives say they’ve been able to comfortably plot new routes for their fleets of 18-wheelers around the area affected by Thursday’s explosive truck accident, and haven’t experienced anything more than a couple hours delay.
“It somewhat limits our ability to conduct business as usual,” said Jim Germak, president of Jagtrux in Marietta. “The gridlock in Harrisburg is something we have to deal with just like everybody else. But it’s not a total panic.”
Germak, who oversees a fleet of 40 trucks that transport materials for a range of customers such as Armstrong ceiling tile in Lancaster, said his drivers suffer from the shutdown most during the day, and particularly during the morning and evening rush hours when traffic jams can extend truck trips up to two hours.
Read more: http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/05/area_truckers_not_troubled_by.html#incart_m-rpt-1
Map of Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States with township and municipal boundaries (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Birdsboro will have plenty to celebrate on Saturday during its annual Duck Race and Spring Festival.
In addition to a pet expo, food, games, music and the signature rubber duck race, the community event will celebrate the highly anticipated reopening of the new Hay Creek Bridge. The span, which crosses the Hay Creek along Main Street (Route 724), was deemed structurally unsound and closed in September for repairs.
The bridge reopened on May 2 and Borough Manager Aaron J. Durso said the impact was immediate.
“It’s nice,” he said. “It frees up traffic on East and West First Street and opens up the main artery for emergency vehicles and fire police.”
Map of Pennsylvania highlighting Berks County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Studies to find out what it would take to make two of Berks County’s most-congested highways a quicker go are now underway.
PennDOT consultants are examining the seven-mile stretch of Route 222 between the Kutztown Bypass in Maxatawny Township and the Trexlertown Bypass in Lehigh County to see how much it would cost to widen it to four lanes.
At the same time, another team is looking at the West Shore Bypass between Wyomissing and Exeter Township to determine what changes could improve traffic flow.
Both studies were discussed Thursday during a meeting of the Reading Area Transportation Study, the panel that plans how state and federal transportation funds are spent in Berks.
COLLEGEVILLE — Collegeville Farmers’ Market is on a real “power” trip this year.
As it opens for its third market season on May 4, one of the local shopper’s favorite haunts for engaging in homegrown commerce is relocating across the street to the grounds of Davinci’s Pub, where it will be empowered by plenty of parking at the adjoining Power House Antique and Flea Market lot.
The market simply outgrew its original space behind the AmeriGreen Gas Station, noted Cathy Kernen, co-chair of the Collegeville Farmers’ Market committee and president of the Collegeville Economic Development Corp.
“We needed more space in order to attract more vendors and grow our market. We were maxed out at 23 vendors at the previous site,” she explained. “We needed more space for customer parking. Lou’s Too, a popular Trappe Restaurant, moved their restaurant adjacent to our market site, and although we had limited parking for handicapped patrons and parents with small children before, we were afraid that operating our market on the same parking lot as that of a popular restaurant would not provide enough parking for both of us.”
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