SAN ANTONIO – Construction crews are working overnight to finish paving the St. Mary’s Strip this week.
After more than two years of construction, the city says the project is in its final stages.
“We’re real close,” said Rod Sanchez, San Antonio assistant city manager. “This is going to be a beautiful street.”
The project’s scope, from East Mistletoe to West Josephine Street, was to make St. Mary’s Strip more accessible. The goals were to expand sidewalks, increase on-street parking spaces, add bike lanes and update intersections, lighting and landscaping.
Daniel Garcia, the owner of 621 Screen Printing, said the end goal of this project is exciting, but how long it’s taken to finish it has stripped some of those feelings.
“We’ve seen a lot of businesses come and go and a lot of c onstruction, but not this much,” Garcia said.
The North St. Mary’s Strip project started on March 15, 2021. The original contractual end date was Oct. 5, 2022. That date got revised to this summer, according to Public Works.
The city added a contractor to help expedite the $11.4 million project.
Garcia opened his print shop 25 years ago. He said the longevity of his business helped him get through the lack of street traffic with all of the construction. But he said others weren’t so lucky.
“It’s hard to recover from that,” Garcia said.
The city has held weekly meetings on Thursday afternoons at St. Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Church to keep the community updated on project developments.
This week, crews are paving the street, completing all sidewalks and continuing traffic signal work at Ashby.
Sanchez said he’s proud of the project and how crews have navigated old infrastructure, weather delays and expanded plans.
“One day feels like a week, but that’s construction,” Sanchez said. “It’s worth it.”
With an end in sight, businesses like Garcia’s are now looking to rebuild the street traffic lost by years of construction.
“It’s going to help this area immensely,” Garcia said. “But it’s just the manner of how things got done here that was troubling, and I got to see it firsthand looking out my window.”
Neither Sanchez nor Public Works gave an updated date for the project’s official completion, but both assured it would be in the next few weeks.
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