Melville adventures

Melville Street is the happening place in Rensselaer these days. The largest construction project currently underway in Rensselaer--the new k-2 school--sits on its north end. There was a crane at the site on Tuesday--I have not had a post about cranes for quite a while--I think the last one was setting the bridge.

Last week a machine was installing curbs for the driveway and parking lots. Over the weekend I wandered a bit closer to the building to get some pictures. The walls on the northern wing seem to be about as high as they are going to get.

But the walls on the southern part of the building are only a few feet high. The wall behind them looks like it is part of a fortification.

A bit to the south and on the other side of Melville, a storage building is taking shape. The concrete floor is finished and the roof trusses are in place.

Across the street from this construction, a contractor is installing poles for a line that will connect the Melville substation with the city power plant. My previous report that this line would run down Elm seems to be wrong, and the update that it would run along Merritt seems to be correct. You can see that the new poles are much taller than the old poles. I wonder if that is the reason that a contractor is installing them rather than the city electrical department. Perhaps their equipment is not designed to handle poles this long.

You can see two bucket trucks in the background. I was hoping to get a picture of them forming a letter of the alphabet, but I never got one.

A final bit of construction along Melville is south near the river. The extension of the Melville storm sewer line has begun, and Stewart Drive is the first street to be torn up.