Louise Avenue is a main access point that connects Manteca and Lathrop.

And it’s about to get a major facelift.

With the blessing of the Lathrop City Council, Louise Avenue will soon start to look a lot like the recently-renovated Lathrop Road complete with landscaped medians, palm trees, shrubbery, and irrigation – giving one the city’s main arterial thoroughfares a more inviting appearance to visitors and locals alike.

The developer of the North Crossroads Business Center Project has already provided its fair share of the required landscaping – $329,627 – that will be used to overhaul the existing east-west arterial to improve the roadway appearance, improve the quality of life for residents, and provide drought-resistant landscaping that can hold up to the harsh Central Valley conditions.

In order to maintain symmetry with other landscaping along Louise Avenue, the developer of the 7 industrial buildings that are being constructed along the frontage of the Crossroads Business Center opted to pay for the improvements rather than make them on their own along the project as required by the development agreement.

The city has plans to allocate additional funding once work on the project begins and the total cost of construction becomes clear.

In addition to providing landscaping – to include ground cover, and palm trees – the city also has plans to install upward-facing lights that illuminate the palm trees at night and improve the overall aesthetics of what has long been an industrial corridor.

Louise Avenue provides access to the Crossroads Business Park as well as the distribution center that is now housed in the old Pilkington Glass Plant – which currently houses the distribution operations of Kraft-Heinz as well as other operations.

The Tesla corporation has also used the corridor when they were storing completed vehicles that had rolled off of the assembly line in Fremont before they were loaded up onto transport trucks and sent off to their final destinations.

Median islands along Louise Avenue were recently completed and extend from the Union Pacific railroad tracks down to I-5. The project will also include landscaping, irrigation, and lighting along Lathrop Road from Cambridge Drive to 5th Street – medians that were installed when the roadway was widened to allow for two lanes of traffic in each direction.

While the majority of Lathrop’s residential development is occurring west of I-5 in the Central Lathrop, Mossdale, and River Islands areas, the city remains committed to improving the area of town known as Historic Lathrop that at one time serves as the city’s residential and commercial core.

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.