Demolition of 325 N. Broad

Thursday 02 January 2014

Let's begin with a quick photo from recent history:

February 2012

This photo is from the southwest corner of the expanse of lot generally known as 325 N. Broad Street. This property extends the entire block from Holly Avenue to my south, up to Fourth Street to the north. You can see that the one-story brick building at the back of this lot backs directly up to the back of my house.

For years, this was the used car lot for Modern Chevrolet, which was a major downtown dealership that was founded in 1933. Since Modern relocated its dealership up to the north end of town, on University Parkway, this building and lot have mostly been empty. For a time, it was the leasing office for the condos and townhouses that were built on the main Modern new car lot. For almost two years, it was home to a private ambulance service. For several weeks, it was used in the local production of a motion picture in town. But it's mostly been empty.

Commercial Realty, Inc., which is developing the new 751 W. Fourth office building to the north of the house, now owns this lot and the gravel lot adjacent to my property and just around the corner along Fourth Street (part of which can be seen in the photo below). The plans for now are uncertain, but when they closed on this property, they also inherited the problematic retaining wall that runs along the back of this lot and which backs up to my property. As I noted recently, part of this wall gave way with the long soaking rains we had just before Christmas Day:

Photo Taken from Rear Attic Window

That whole wall is going to be taken down, and the process began early this morning with the demolition of that abandoned sales building for the former used car portion of Modern Chevy. I was pretty much mesmerized by it all day long...I love watching stuff like this.

Caught sight of the beginning from the back hallway window.

The first scoop or two has been taken at this point.

The operator of the crawler-excavator handles this
machine with tremendous finesse.

View from the 4th Street entrance of the gravel lot beside the house.

View from up top, near the intersection of Holly Avenue and Broad Street.
You can see the back of the Roediger House
(and the attic window from which many of these shots were taken)

The attic is unfinished and I straddled floor beams at this window
to capture as much of the action as I could.

A cold rain started late morning.

At the end of the day, all that was left standing was the
shell of the storage room on the back.

Isn't this why we put windows at our kitchen sinks?