It could have seven years left. Or it could have as many as 12.
Either way, the 39-year-old Pugh Street parking garage is approaching the end of its useful life, State College public-works director Mark Whitfield said last week.
Opened in 1971, the 491-spot garage was the first of its kind in the region. It remains the second-largest public parking facility in downtown State College — second only to the $12 million Beaver Avenue garage, opened in late 2005.
But the Pugh garage was built before engineers included ‘mild steel,’ an embedded structural-reinforcement element, in parking-garage designs.
That means the weight of the upper Pugh garage floors is supported entirely by the metal cables buried inside the concrete floors themselves.
It’s not an unsafe design, Whitfield emphasized; it just isn’t likely to last as long as the 525-spot Beaver Avenue garage or the 335-spot Fraser Street garage, opened in 1985, he said. Both of those newer State College garages were built with the mild-steel reinforcement.
Just one other known Pennsylvania facility of the Pugh Street garage’s vintage lasted as long, Whitfield said. And that structure, in West Chester, Chester County, was dismantled within the past couple years.
Whitfield said State College has managed to prolong the Pugh garage’s life in part by not spreading salt there in the cold weather. ‘I believe that goes a long way in why the garage is in the shape it is now,’ he said.
The borough will get a more thorough sense of the facility’s condition in 2011, when a contractor is scheduled to conduct a complete appraisal of the garage, including its buried support cables. The last such appraisal was conducted in 2005, when a few cables were replaced. Next year’s assessment should give the borough a better sense of exactly how many years the Pugh garage has left, Whitfield said.
‘We know rusting is going on inside the concrete,’ he said. ‘The question is, how far into the cables’ has it reached?
Already, Whitfield said, borough staff members are looking preliminarily at how to recalibrate downtown parking once the Pugh garage comes down. It’s possible that a new parking garage will be built not at the Pugh Street site, but somewhere else between Pugh and Garner streets, Whitfield said.
In order to accommodate a garage the size of the current facility, a site would need to be roughly 200 feet long and 260 feet wide, he said.
‘There aren’t a lot of pieces of property available in the downtown area’ that could accommodate those dimensions, Whitfield added. He said the borough has ‘begun to look’ at opportunities, but he declined to identify specific locations this early in the process.
‘Ideally, we would want to overbuild it somewhat’ in anticipation of further growth and demand, Whitfield said.
The thorough assessment of the Pugh Street garage is expected to be complete by the end of next summer.
