DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The Main Street coquina arch in Daytona Beach is now closed ahead of getting some much-needed repairs. The iconic arch that goes over the beach approach is almost 100 years old.
The city now has it surrounded by a fence to protect people from the coquina debris falling from the arch.
“We noticed cracking in the main structure. That’s when we closed it off and removed the pieces we were concerned were going to fail and fall,” said David Waller, the city’s Public Works Director. “We had engineers working on our pier after Hurricane Nicole and in their work at the pier they noticed cracking in the arch and with a little further of an investigation we determined that it had structurally failed inside the arch.”
The coquina arch, bandshell, and clocktower were built in the late 1920s and early 1930s by the Works Progress Administration, an agency that was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to create jobs during the Great Depression.
“We’ve done a full renovation of the bandshell and clock tower in the last 10 years,” said Waller.
Now, all three are iconic city landmarks.
“We expect work to start in early October and there will be a lot of demo, it’ll be a little scary out the gate. We’re going to see a lot of the arch removed,” said Waller. “We’re going to pour back a solid concrete wall in the shape of the arch with fiberglass rebar so we don’t have the salt intrusion issue that we had before.”
Waller said preserving the look of the arch and its history is a top priority.
“We have a great stone mason who is working on it and he’s hand-cutting all of the decorative pieces from new coquina rock,” he said. “We’ll attach stone to the concrete so it’ll have that coquina look and it’ll appear the same, it’ll just have a solid concrete interior to it.”
The city hopes to have these repairs done by next summer.
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