Lafayette Building falls in slow motion
Posted by Arjun ThomasSourced from Freep.com
The long, slow death of downtown’s Lafayette Building has given gawkers something new to look at and bloggers something new to complain about online.
Detroit’s Downtown Development Authority voted last June 25 to demolish the vacant office building. Seven months later, the building was still only half down this week, with a lot more work to go.
Waymon Guillebeaux, vice president of project management for the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., which oversees the demolition, said two major delays cropped up since the DDA’s vote.
First, nearby filming of the movie “Red Dawn” stopped demolition work, and then a sinkhole on nearby Shelby necessitated a water main replacement that also stopped demolition work.
Rick Cuppetilli, project manager for Adamo Demolition, said his crews lost 14 working days to the movie shoot and 45 working days to the water main replacement, or more than two months in all.
But the project remains on track to have the building down, the debris removed, and a pocket park landscaped there before summer. “We expect to have that building out of the way by June,” Guillebeaux said this week.
The slow-motion razing has prompted a variety of reactions. Scott Stinebaugh, head of marketing for the Westin Book Cadillac, the renovated luxury hotel just across Michigan Avenue from the Lafayette, said the noise and dust have not created any problems for the hotel or its guests.
“We really have not had any sort of disruptions or any sort of issue with the demolition of that building,” he said, adding, “We certainly look forward to the completion of the project.”
Nonetheless, the months-long project has given online commentators plenty of nits to pick.
When dozens of media members flocked to the nearby Theodore Levin U.S. Courthouse for a Jan. 8 hearing for alleged terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a New York Times freelancer posted a photo of the demolition work on Twitter with the caption: “Only in Detroit.”
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