Construction Maison

The detention pond at the former ALCOA Inc. West Plant is complete, as the redevelopment continues. The Alcoa Board of Commissioners got a bird’s- eye view Monday of the new detention pond , which is located in the curve where Hall Road meets Alcoa Highway , thanks to a stationary webcam the city has trained on the construction site. Five photos taken over the course of one day — Wednesday, Aug. 16 — show how the detention pond area evolved as it was prepped for seeding, explained Andrew Sonner , assistant director/chief engineer for Alcoa’s Public Works and Engineering Department. The rectangular portion shown at the bottom of the photos is the “fore bay,” he told commissioners, which is where sediment settles before clean water continues over the berms and “meanders” toward the point of exit, where it will join Culton Creek . Commissioners learned at a briefing in July that an underground spring on the property could feed a water feature on the West Plant site ,...

The Late Victorian period in the United States—roughly the last third of the 19th century—produced some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the history of Western civilization . It also produced some of the most hopeless slums. In response to the crisis of industrial cities, the modern discipline of city planning emerged . The tools of this new profession helped clean up many unhealthy aspects of urban industry , but also stifled some of the best innovations of Late Victorian urbanism . By the 1920s, planners in the industrial world had established the legal authority to promulgate land-use regulations, and over the next generation, they succeeded at slowing the construction of slum housing and segregating noxious industries from incompatible activities, such as housing and office space. Through some of the same devices, however, planners curtailed some positive features of 19th- century urbanism , including the rich variety of free- form industrial development and the adaptiv...