On the last day of 2018, signs of life began to emerge at 19 Main Street in Jaffrey.
Employees of Hutter Construction Corp. arrived at the site of the Park Theatre around 7 a.m. on Monday to prepare the site for excavation work, which began on Wednesday morning.
“There’s stuff happening, and people are slowing down to take notice,” Park Theatre CEO Steve Jackson said Monday morning.
Excavation and foundation work represent the first piece in constructing the state-of-the-art, fully-accessible theater from the ground up.
Construction should take 12 to 14 months in total, setting up a potential 2020 opening.
“All we are focused on right now is getting things going,” Jackson said. “We can touch 2018 with a day of work.”
Jackson said Wednesday that foundation work is scheduled to begin the week of Jan. 14. Quality Concrete Construction Inc. of Rindge will be doing the work over the course of several weeks, Jackson said.
The site will go semi-dormant in the late winter months, with framing scheduled to begin in mid-April. Jackson said the structural steelwork may occur in February/March.
Park Theatre officials announced at the beginning of December that they had secured all funding and approvals needed to construct the 485-seat theater.
The first iteration of the Park Theatre opened in 1922. The theater served as a movie and vaudeville house until it closed in 1976.
Nicholas Handy can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 235 or nhandy@ledgertranscript.com.