Weekend closures of 39th Avenue by University of Kansas Hospital will begin Friday

A popular route near the University of Kansas Hospital that connects the two Kansas Citys will be closed the next six weekends beginning Friday afternoon.

Crews will close 39th Avenue between Rainbow Boulevard and State Line Road in Kansas City, Kan., on weekends so they can lift steel beams into place for a two-story walkway.

The road will close at 2 p.m. Friday and reopen at 6 a.m. Monday. The process will be repeated the five following weekends, weather permitting.

The walkway is being constructed to connect the hospital’s Center for Advanced Heart Care to the Cambridge North Patient Tower, which is under construction.

“It’s a steel and glass structure that mirrors the aesthetics of the existing heart center as well as the new Cambridge North Tower project,” said John McDonough, vice president of facilities services and real estate development at the University of Kansas Hospital.

“It’s principally a glass and curtain wall construction,” he said. “There’s a level of transparency that’s built into the bridge, designed to diminish the overall mass of this two-story structure that is spanning Cambridge Street in front of the hospital as well as going over 39th” Avenue.

The bridge, once completed, will weigh about 500,000 pounds and have about 15,000 square feet of glass.

Construction of the walkway bridge, which started with the building of its foundations, is expected to take six to seven months. Crews are expected to complete the structure and enclose the bridge this summer.

“We are at the point now where all the foundations have been set, and this is our first weekend of several weekends of setting fairly significant structural steel over Cambridge Street and 39th” Avenue, McDonough said.

During the closures, traffic will be detoured via Olathe Boulevard, which is south of 39th, using State Line Road and Rainbow to get around the hospital campus.

Traffic will be able to access the hospital from the south via Olathe Boulevard and Cambridge Street.

Crews are closing the street so that a large crane can be set up Friday. The work begins Saturday morning and wraps up Sunday. Overnight Sunday, the crane will be disassembled and removed.

The process will be repeated each weekend until all the steel is lifted into place. Work to set the glass and install the roof will continue after the steel is in place and is expected to be completed in July.

The closures could extend to other weekends if weather delays the construction. The hospital has set up a website to provide residents and businesses in the area more information. For more information, click here.

Once completed, the walkway will allow public assess to the Cambridge North Patient Tower on one level, while medical traffic will use the other.

It will provide an important link between the existing hospital south of 39th and the new construction north of 39th.

“Without this, folks would have to go outside in all sorts of weather and cross the streets — leave one building and go into another and deal with all of that,” McDonough said. “From a patient point of view, we would have to put patients in ambulances to go from the Heart Center to Bell Hospital over into Cambridge.”

The $320 million, 13-story Cambridge North Patient Tower will have 92 beds and 12 operating rooms when the first phase opens in 2017. A 32-bed unit and three unfinished floors will be added several months later.

The building will house the hospital’s neuroscience and cancer surgery services, two of the hospital’s fastest-growing areas.

This story was originally published March 31, 2016 at 3:20 PM with the headline "Weekend closures of 39th Avenue by University of Kansas Hospital will begin Friday."