East Zaragoza Street is getting a makeover. Why, and how it will impact traffic.

As part of an effort to continue improving visitors' experiences in Historic Pensacola, the University of West Florida Historic Trust has partnered with the city of Pensacola to make improvements to East Zaragoza Street in downtown Pensacola.

The project is intended to improve safety and accessibility along East Zaragoza Street by making the sidewalks compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), implementing curb extensions on the south side of the road and installing bollards at both ends of the street.

It will also narrow East Zaragoza Street to encourage drivers to travel slower and implement a raised crosswalk for pedestrians that will lead them directly into the Historic Village.

The East Zaragoza Street project will start Monday and cause intermittent road closures from South Tarragona Street to South Adams Street during its duration. Traffic will be detoured and guided as needed during closures.

Both the Historic Trust's and the city of Pensacola’s engineers would like to keep closures to a minimum in order to avoid impacting motorists and pedestrians, according to the Historic Trust’s Executive Director Robert Overton.

Overton also said that the street’s parking situation won’t change as a result of the project.

The project is being carried out by the city of Pensacola, which the Historic Trust will later reimburse, according to the city of Pensacola's Assistant Public Information Officer Dominique Epps.

City officials expect the project to be done by October, weather permitting.

There are no plans for the same layout to be implemented on the other side of the Historic Village on East Government Street. The intent is to create a better focus point for visitors at the front of the Historic Village, according to Historic Preservationist Ross Pristera.

“The entrance to the village is hard to see, so part of (our process) was let’s try to do an actual entrance,” Pristera said. “By the end of the (calendar) year the street should be done, the village will have whole a new walkway system and the buildings will be painted … It’ll be a whole new kind of area.”

Overton told the News Journal in June that the Historic Trust’s leadership is focused on developing its existing public space to be more welcoming for visitors, beginning with the Museum of Industry on East Zaragoza Street.

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The Historic Trust recently finished a project to renovate its Museum of Industry and the train car, formerly owned by the T.R. Miller company, as part of its goal to develop their existing public spaces.

The Trust also plans to re-paint some of its historic homes, like the Lavalle House and the Lear/Rocheblave House, while this construction project is underway.

“Now we were able to make (the Museum of Industry) so that everybody, no matter their ability or disability, can go in and out the same entrance,” Overton told the News Journal in June. “It’s our goal to eventually have everything as much as we can done that way, it’s a challenge with historic structures.”

There are 30 properties in downtown Pensacola that make up Historic Pensacola, 12 of which are normally available to the public. The site encompasses 8.5 acres stretching from Palafox Street to Florida Blanca Street.

The Historic Trust possesses over 150,000 artifacts - of either historical or antiquarian interest to the city of Pensacola, Escambia County and West Florida as a whole - and is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday and from noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays.

For more information on Historic Pensacola and its sites visit https://historicpensacola.org.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Downtown Pensacola East Zaragoza Street road work at Historic Village