A Cedar Street property that borders the Little Schuylkill River will be coming down to make way for an extension of the Tamaqua River Walk.

Council approved the demolition of 233 Cedar St. during a recent meeting. The knockdown was approved by the Tamaqua Historical Architectural Review Committee this month and recommended to council.

The river walk is a project of the Tamaqua Area Community Partnership, which bought the Cedar Street building a few years ago. The partnership completed the first phase of the project almost a decade ago, a paved riverside path between Cedar Street and Willing Park.

The property’s demolition will be part of the second phase, and when it is down, it will allow the walk to extend from Cedar Street to East Broad Street.

The borough recently received a $424,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation for the proposed work.

The next stretch of the walk will pass the Tamaqua ABC Hi-Rise, and earlier this month, Micah Gursky, the partnership’s executive director, visited Hi-Rise residents to discuss plans.

“If you lived in Tamaqua for as long as I have, you know that the river isn’t something that we highlight,” he said. “We put the river to the back of our buildings” and it was often polluted by acid mine drainage and wildcat sewers.

Over the years, he said, its waters became clean thanks to environmental controls.

“The river really has made a transformation, and has become something that everyone is proud of,” he said. “So we decided in 2001 through our Community Action Plan that we wanted to develop a walkway along the river.”

Gursky said the Cedar Street property will be demolished sometime this year.

He explained that the street level walkway will be 5-feet wide, and will be bordered by a railing and lighting.

“It will give you a very nice, accessible way to get to the grocery store,” he said, referring to Boyer’s.

It will be safer than the current route, which involves walking on Pine Street alley to a blind curb, he noted.

A parallel walkway will be created on the other side of the river on a 1.1-acre South Greenwood Street parcel that the partnership recently purchased.

While the house will come down this year, it might take another “year or two” for completion of the second phase, Gursky said.

He said he’s hopeful that an additional grant will be received to eventually construct a pedestrian bridge connecting both walkways.

Last month, Tamaqua Borough Council applied for a $750,000 grant from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources on behalf of the partnership.