JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Out of sight was definitely not out of mind for the people tasked with engineering West Walnut Street’s four-year, $35 million overhaul – even if the results seem all about the visuals.

Most of the money and labor from general contractor Summers-Taylor and City of Johnson City went to replacing century-old infrastructure and putting electric and communications wires underground.

Citizens, visitors, business owners and investors will notice the beautiful skin on top of what lies beneath — landscaping, quaint streetlights, bike lanes and lots of brick pavers. But Summers-Taylor President Grant Summers and City Engineer Wallace McCulloch saw the grit underneath for four long years, and both say that work accomplished goals as important as the beautification that’s visible now.

“You look at the total price of the project, there’s a certain amount of utilities that needed to be replaced just to keep the current service level and to add more,” Summers told News Channel 11.

“Upgrading the capacity of the water, upgrading the capacity of the storm drains to help with downtown flooding, those are things that needed to be done.”

When crews began ripping up a mile of Walnut and about a half-mile of Ashe Street in late 2021, Summers and McCulloch knew the project was going to include a lot of “unknown unknowns.” Summers had gotten a foretaste when his company bought and refurbished the Model Mill at Walnut and Sevier streets, smack in the middle of the corridor, several years earlier.

“The waterline that we tied into when we were building the mill was installed in 1909, but we kind of knew where it was,” Summers said.

That often wasn’t the case with the project.

“You start going elsewhere, there’s a lot of times we ran into something and I was like, ‘oh, didn’t know that was in there,'” he said. “So that caused some slower underground construction. But we expected that.”

In hindsight, McCulloch said, the project should have had a longer initial timeline than two years (it took four). All water and sewer lines were replaced, as well as storm drains, while electric and other communications were expanded and put underground.

“All that becomes a spaghetti, crossings and trying to make those things work,” McCulloch said.

“There’s a lot of stuff in the ground that nobody knew was there,” Summers added. “My guys’d be laying a water line and you’d come to something, you’ve got to stop, there’s a few days of ‘hey, how do we design, how do we get around that’ and it was just a lot of stop and go.”

In some ways, McCulloch said, it was an engineer’s dream.

“I thoroughly enjoyed it,” he said. “Problem solving is part of being an engineer and this thing had problems to solve, and so we had to fix those things. But to see it come to the end like it is and it’s pretty, the landscaping just really makes it stand out.”

Among those problems were dealing with two existing large water lines that crossed each other under Cherokee Street, running a huge pipe (42-inch) under the railroad and State of Franklin to deliver stormwater into Founders Park and Brush Creek, and creating a “conflict box” where a storm drain and utility wires intersected.

It all occurred as business owners tried to keep open as they endured detours and dusty streets.

“(We were) trying to keep them going and at the same time make the project work, and so we did delay things sometimes just to kind of make the overall thing work,” McCulloch said.

Summers said several things made him want the company to finish the work as soon as possible. For one, he lives here and works in the corridor.

“For a construction company, the quicker you get it done, the less overhead, the less escalation of materials cost, less everything,” he said. “I certainly wanted to get it done as quickly as possible.”

Summers said business owners were reasonable as they worked through the challenges.

“All the properties up and down here, we don’t want to ever hurt a business. So making sure that there is some way to access their business and to try and let everybody know what those ways are and put up signs, ‘this is a detour and things like that,'” he said.

He also said those challenges were significant.

“We’ve done plenty of projects like this and you know this was very interesting, it was very challenging. Just the amount of underground in a tight space and the lack of knowledge of what was there because of its age certainly put it in the top 10, let’s just say.”

With a ribbon-cutting a day away, everyone gets to enjoy the “icing on the cake.”

“It gives you a sense of just somewhere you’d like to be to take a walk,” McCulloch said.

While what people can see didn’t represent the most cost or the project’s sole impact, Summers said “the product needed to be very high quality.

“I think it’s going to be great,” said Summers, who owns a former Sears warehouse on Walnut’s south side just west of Boyd Street. “I think you’re going to see people clean up buildings and then businesses that want to locate here and hopefully the demand matches up.”

He sees possibilities for the old Sears building that wouldn’t involve tearing it down.

“It’s a great building, so, you know, we’ll see. I’d love to see something happen there, whether it was some office, some residential.

“Now that this is finished to a point where it’s not a hindrance, I think we’ll start looking at that more seriously and see what we can come up with.”