Apartment Look

Demolition begins this week on a downtown San Pedro block that will be transformed into a seven- story apartment building that many hope will boost patronage for area shops, restaurants and the waterfront now beginning to take shape. Officials will mark the start of demolition at an informal groundbreaking at 9:30 a.m. Thursday at 550-560 S. Palos Verdes St . A more formal ceremony will be held in the coming weeks, according to the developer. Demolition is expected to take about a month and construction of the new 375-unit building should be complete in about three years, with the opening anticipated for 2020. It’s one of several residential developments planned to be built in and around the downtown San Pedro area over the next few years. Originally under the hands of Omninet Capital, the project was sold to Holland Partner Group in June for $24.5 million. Holland also is in exclusive negotiations to redevelop San Pedro ’s closed county courthouse just blocks away. Fewer, bigger...

Motorists who use North Main Street to travel between downtown Fort Worth and the Stockyards should be prepared to use a detour — for roughly the next three years. Starting at 3 a.m. Saturday, North Main Street will be closed in both directions between Northeast Seventh and 11th streets — not far from LaGrave Field and the Coyote Drive-In theater. Traffic will be detoured to Commerce Street and delays for drivers are expected to be minimal. The reason? Workers will be building a new bridge as part of the nearly $ 1 billion Panther Island project that will eventually carry North Main Street traffic over a re-routed portion of the Trinity River. The bridge will be built over dry land so that when the money is available to re-route the river, the road will already be in place. The closure of the four-block stretch of North Main Street is expected to last until some time in 2020, officials said. “Access to local businesses on North Main Street will be maintained, and the detour w...