See what Bourbon Street will look like after major infrastructure overhaul

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City officials are about to begin the most extensive Bourbon Street infrastructure overhaul in years, digging up all of the asphalt from Canal Street to Dumaine Street and replacing it with eight inches of white concrete. The construction schedule means that starting sometime after French Quarter Fest, major areas of Bourbon Street will become a construction zone over the next eight months.

Using concrete instead of asphalt is typically more expensive, but city officials said it will be easier to maintain because it will be poured in sections and those sections can be removed and replaced. Renderings of the new look for Bourbon Street give the thoroughfare a cleaner, brighter look, but concrete sections on Iberville Street have weathered significantly over the years.

The work will be done over an unusually tight timeline that Department of Public Works Director Mark Jernigan said will mean work crews will need to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, beginning at 6 a.m. The work will take place Monday through Saturday, starting in late April, and will include replacing drain lines, water lines and repairing and lining sewers. Entergy also plans to replace steel gas lines with high-pressure gas lines.

"We're compressing the schedule as much as we can to get it done as quickly as we can," Jernigan said. "The timeline we're working off of, one way or another, we're going to be done by the end of the year."

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