Belize City residents, or anyone that has passed by the the Swing Bridge intersection has probably noticed that a large arch has been erected on North Front Street. Well today work on that structure was completed, and Mayor Darrell Bradley officially introduced the city to the Gateway to the Fort Street Tourism Zone. Mayor Bradley told us more about this new Belize City landmark...
Darrell Bradley - Belize City Mayor “We’ve been working with our partners including the Belize Tourism Board and I mention cariled over the last I would say 18 months in terms of trying to organise the Fort George Tourism Zone better. You can see as we had the ceremony there was a tremendous amount of traffic in the area, the competition in terms of residence and then the buses and then the vendors and businesses and so forth. So that we’ve been working over many months to try to see how we can put in place various policies that would make the area come alive. It was always the idea to really have a gateway monument to be a focal point and entrance way into the area to that you can mark the area. You will note that originally when there was the project in this area there was an original gateway here, for reasons beyond ourselves it was something that way not particularly fitting. Members in the community had complained about the construction and so forth, there were difficulties in relation to the carnival season because the carnival trucks couldn’t pass. So that what we did is that we started from square one and we were working with our stakeholders in terms of doing a design that would be aesthetically appealing so that the gateway arch this morning has multiple features. First of all its made of stone so that in terms of the design that’s one of the things that the committee selected. We also wanted to accentuate the beauty of Belize in terms of the tropical beauty so the flowers and areas where we want to keep those things properly maintained and then also we are using it for utilitarian purposes so that it will form itself a crosswalk because we know that this area is extremely busy so that it would provide an aspect of safety for people who are in this particular area and then also it allows us to highlight the new Belize City brand.â€
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