Canal Street

The Canal Street upgrades are part of the overall master plan for the new judicial center, but is funded through a separate stream of grants than the Lord Overpass main project.

In 2015, Lowell received a $13,389,750 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery Discretionary Grant Program, known as TIGER VII, for the replacement and/or rehabilitation of six local canal bridges currently in various states of disrepair or deterioration.

The TIGER umbrella includes funding for eight targeted structures in Lowell:

: Pawtucket Street over the Pawtucket Canal.

: Pawtucket Street over the Northern Canal.

: Merrimack Street over the Western Canal.

: Central Street over the Lower Pawtucket Canal.

: Merrimack Street over the Merrimack Canal.

: Suffolk Street over the Northern Canal.

: Broadway over the Pawtucket Canal.

: Kearney Square over the Eastern Canal.

Some of those projects are completed, and the rest are under active construction.

“The last one to be finished will be the Central Street bridge rehabilitation.” Thomas said, with a scheduled date of September 2022.

It includes the dredging of Pawtucket Canal and the reinforcement of the concrete center support, but its impact on traffic will be minimal, Thomas said. The work includes solidifying the Central Street bridge’s center-span, which also serves as a base for the city’s famous stone-sculpted art pieces.

The work stalled for several months while engineers worked out the water problem. Since most of the structural repairs will be done in concrete, the canal bed must be completely dry.

They solved the problem by damming the canal with a network of sandbags, cement and plastic. Through the cement barricade, though, are eight large tubes that allow the water to bypass the work area without saturating it.

Plain Street and into the Highlands section of Lowell.

MASSDOT said the work was delayed when additional steel repairs were required after extensive deterioration was discovered following the removal of the bridge deck. The $4.8 million project was originally scheduled to be completed next summer, but the delays have pushed that date back to fall 2021.