A hand-written message on a detour sign near the interminable if not eternal bridge repair project in Westmont, NJ says it all.
The Empire State Building took a year.
Actually, it was a year and 45 days, according to an ESB website. The skyscraper construction record still stands, but is rivaled by the protracted process of rehabbing the tiny, two-lane Camden County span that carries Park Avenue across the Newton Creek in Haddon Township.
This blink of a bridge between Cuthbert Road and Crystal Lake Avenue was closed to traffic in September, 2012; work sputtered to a halt last December and has been sputtering, on and off, ever since. See my May 31 column about the project here.
"Definitely not ideal" was how county spokesman Dan Keashen describes the pace of the $329,000 project, completion of which now awaits fabrication of a couple of manhole covers. That work was necessitated by replacement of a sewer line, which was necessitated by installation of customized structural reinforcements that were made necessary after the quality of some new concrete was found wanting.
Keashen predicts the bridge will reopen in early January.