Each of these has a page written about Maplewood specifically.
Minnesota banned coal tar sealant statewide in 2014, and Maplewood's own stormwater standards name coal tar sealers separately, so a spec here has two rules behind it instead of one. We run an asphalt emulsion, Pitch Black. The lots that get sealed here are the mall and the retail around it on White Bear and Beam, the hospital campus, the corporate campus, and the office and industrial buildings along Highway 36. On a property that size the sealing gets measured area by area, because a customer lot and a service drive are two different jobs.
Crack Filling and Sealing
The lots carrying the crack list here are the big ones: the mall's ring road and its outlots, the hospital approaches on Beam Avenue, the corporate campus, and the industrial buildings along Gervais. On a ring road the cracks open in the turns, where the surface takes a sideways load every time a car comes around. Wide cracks get routed to a clean face and hot rubber goes in at 400 degrees so it bonds to the walls and stays flexible instead of pulling loose. Fall, before the ground freezes, is when a filled crack does the most good.
Asphalt Repair and Patching
A 931,000 square foot mall has service pavement most people never see: the ring road, the compactor and delivery side behind the anchors, and the lanes trucks use getting in and out. That's where the failures are, because that's where the loaded axles are. A pothole in a truck lane is a base problem with a surface symptom, so it's saw-cut back to sound asphalt, the failed base dug out and rebuilt in lifts, hot mix rolled in flush and the joint sealed. The Gervais Avenue industrial buildings are the same problem at a smaller scale.
The Ramsey-Washington Metro Watershed District permits stormwater, erosion control and illicit discharge here, and its Rule C requires a site-specific operations and maintenance plan with a signed maintenance agreement, drafted before the permit is issued and handed over as-built before it closes; Maplewood offers joint maintenance agreements. So on a property here the structures in the lot usually have paperwork attached to them. A basin whose frame has dropped pulls the asphalt around it down a little every winter, and by the time the ring of broken asphalt shows, it's been moving for years. Rebuilt means the structure reset to grade, a new collar, and the asphalt saw-cut back and keyed in at the right pitch.
The mall carries 931,000 square feet of retail on two floors with Birch Run Station next door, and lots that size get read by people who have never been on the property before. ADA stalls and access aisles go in at the federal dimensions, fire lanes get marked, and the crossings from the stalls to the doors are part of the layout rather than an afterthought. The hospital on Beam Avenue is the other kind of lot, where the accessible stalls are in use all day. A new layout gets set out and chalked first, and a restripe over fresh sealer waits for the sealer to cure.
Track and Athletic Surfaces
Neither of ISD 622's high schools is in Maplewood: North High is in North St. Paul and Tartan is in Oakdale. The high school inside the city is Hill-Murray, a private school on a 40-acre site on Larpenteur Avenue, which runs track and field and tennis and is listed as a Maplewood track venue. Ramsey County's Aldrich Arena on White Bear Avenue is the other institutional sports property here, and an arena's pavement is parking and service rather than playing surface. Track and court work is a summer job, and the layout gets measured rather than eyeballed.
Compactor and dumpster pads behind the mall's anchors, dock aprons on the Gervais Avenue industrial buildings, curb and gutter around the hospital campus. A pad gets poured for the front axle of the truck that services it, which is a bigger number than the container sitting on it. Commercial pours go down at 4,500 PSI with tied rebar, and the asphalt around the pour goes back in as part of the same work.
The mall's former Sears and Macy's space is being redeveloped as the Pan Asian Center, and the METRO Bronze Line is planned along White Bear and Maryland avenues with 22 stations and five miles of dedicated bus lanes. Work like that changes how the lots around it get used, and a lot that's about to change use is worth deciding on before it's resurfaced. On an existing lot the choice is overlay or tear out, and the base answers it: an overlay over a failed base follows the same failure back up within a couple of years. New asphalt waits six to twelve months before its first seal.
