Ear on Chicago; Make Way For Tomorrow: Speedway Wrecking Company

This is the story of the Speedway Racking Company, a story of Chicago progress aptly entitled Make Way for Tomorrow. Our story takes place on Chicago's near south side at the Fisk Station of the Commonwealth Edison Company, where a building is being torn down to make room for a new one. Our guide is Bud Routenberg, General Superintendent of the Speedway Racking Company. The gentleman that we're going to talk to first is the man that I mentioned at the beginning of the show, who he is our guide on the program, Bud Routenberg, the General Superintendent. But I think before we start to describe the job that you're working on right now, we ought to have a little bit of background on the company itself. I know the Speedway is one of the most famous wrecking companies in the world, and right here in Chicago it's done a lot of work. When did it start? Well actually the history of Speedway goes back quite a number of years,

but as far as the progress in the city of Chicago is concerned, we actually started, let's call the biggest job in the city with the century of progress in 1936 by taking down the sky ride at that particular time. In 1939 we left the city here and went to Susamery, Michigan to dig the MacArthur lock. Getting back to 1936, you mean after the fare was over? That's right. You went over there and took down that tremendous sky ride. I know a lot of people will remember that one. Well not only the sky ride, when I said sky ride, I mean that was one of the largest parts of the demolition program in the city. We also wrecked many of the buildings at the show head on the island at that time. We don't want to jump too fast, I mean as far as the city is concerned, or do we want to spend a lot of time going from one year to the next, but I'm just trying to give you the high points of what you - Go on to 1939 there, you were talking about that. All right. Susamery, Michigan, that's the MacArthur locks at that time, that was the largest excavation that was done

at any one particular time. The 22 -story capital building here in the city was also done in 1939, many people should remember that. It was at the corner, the northeast corner of Randolph and State. When was that building built? That was built in 1891, it had 22 stories, glass, stone, and steel, and we took that down in record time of 59 days. People said we were - we just couldn't do it, but we worked around the clock and we were able to accomplish this feat. Why were you so - Why were you in such a hurry? Well, they had a penalty on the job and they were anxious to get the new building in, I suppose, taxes and so forth, and new leases to be taken care of at that time, all had part to be taken in consideration. What was the next big job, bud? Well, in 44, we took down 2600 Clyburn Avenue, a 265 -foot brick smoke stack, it weighed about 4 ,000 tons, and we

undermined it by use of shoring and set a fire to it and dropped it in a perfectly straight line within a radius of 100 feet. We had the LaSalle Street Warehouse Fire, as you probably remember, a 320 North LaSalle right along the river, a superior sleep right company that had a loss more than a million dollars. The General Frances Thore, in 1952, which took, I believe, five lives at that time. But what are you, you're on call from the fire department to go in and demolish the wrecks after the fire? Well, we are on call for the emergency work in the City of Chicago where there is life or dangerous conditions existing where a wall might in hamper the work of the fire department or the City of Chicago for safety's sake. Now, bud, I know that there's another interesting story, and I want to save that for a little later on in the program, and that's the story of wrecking old mansions

on the north side, well all over the city for that matter, and that's been done more in recent years, I think, than in past years. That's right. Well, I want to talk to you about that, but we're going to save that for a little later in the show. I think it's about time now that we get into the story of the job that you're working on today. What is it? Well, this is the old powerhouse, one of the oldest powerhouses ever built in the City of Chicago. I believe, though, that if you want to get a good picture of this particular building, the thing to do is do like we do, start at the top where the job starts, and if you want to go up on top and see our job superintendent, Marshall Coco, who is best qualified to answer any questions pertaining to this particular job, I'd like to show you the way up, and let's talk to him. All right, Bud, thanks, and the next step we'll have then is to go up there to the roof. The roof is already removed, and they're working on the underpinnings now, and we'll go up there and talk to Marshall Coco. Well, as you could hear, that's the sound of an air hammer

going to work with the Speedway Racking Company, and as we mentioned just a moment ago, we've come up to the almost to the roof of the building that's being demolished here at the Edison Company. Now, we've met Marshall Coco up here, and Marshall, if we'll step over here a little away from that air hammer, I think we'll have a little better chance to talk. Marshall, first of all, we're standing on a partial floor, it looks like, about how high in the air are we? Well, you right now were approximately 50 feet in the air, this was the old locker room floor, and the top of the building, as you could see right here, is about 25 foot higher, making the total about 75 foot. And how big was the building, all towed? Roughly, it was about 100 foot by 200, equivalent to an eight -story building. Well, I can imagine, from what I see over here, and that hopper, that it's a difficult job. It really isn't a big one, but it's a tough one, isn't it? Well, I think that's about as tough of a job as you're ever going to run into in a wreck in a business. Not from the standpoint of being difficult, but from the standpoint of being very tedious. You can only put maybe five, six men in there at one time, you have concrete walls, 30 inches thick, and then you have

plates, and then more concrete, which makes it a very long, tedious job. Now, Mars, I want to start from the beginning, before we get into this job, particular job that we're standing in front of, and let me first of all describe what we can see around us. Out in the hall, about 35 feet away, is a great gaping hole, where once stood a magnificent building belonging to the Edison Company. There's a crane working in there now, and the ball is crashing down on some other flooring that is about doll 35 or 40 feet below us. A little while later in the program, we'll be down there, and recording the action of that ball and of the crane. But right now, we're standing in the corner, a good way away from that gaping hole, and over here to our left, it won't be long before what we're standing on will be no longer. Now, Marsha, where would you start when you come into wreck this building on your first day? Where would you start? Well, like any other building, you'll start from the top and work down. I'd say, as a

general rule, it would be the reverse as the way the building went up. The last thing that was put in the building would be the first thing to come out. That would be a good general principle to follow. All right, now we can assume that the roof is already gone, even though there is just a partial roof above us here to the left. We're standing on what looks to be about two floors from the roof, and down here to our left is some kind of a hopper. What is that? Right now, I should say, prior to demolishing it, it was a fly ash hopper, and it used to be a full hopper, and we are demolishing two of them at the present time. Now, one of your air hammers, your air hammers, have to go through there. It looks like a real sick wall. Well, your four walls were about 30 inches of concrete, and we thought that was pretty tough until we hit the bottom of these things. Now, we got a metal plate on the outside, about six or eight inches of concrete underneath that, and then you come to a cast iron plate, and then you've got gunite underneath the cast iron, which is this place is rough to take out as concrete. Then you have more plates

and more concrete, and as yet, I don't know just how far we have to go until we see daylight in it. Well, that's a real tough job. That really is a tough job. What about up here to our left here, Marshall, we see some beams, some eye beams still left standing? Well, how are you going to tear them down? Well, we're going to burn those down. We're going to hook on them with the crane and take them down. When we can get in and take the steel out, we'll feel pretty good because that's already the end of the job. The important thing is getting to it. Marshall, one of the amazing things that I've noticed around the city of Chicago, and there's a great deal of wrecking going on all over the city, is the fact that all of the wrecking seems to be done within the walls of the building. Very seldom do you see bricks fly over on the outside. How do you keep from having a wall toppling over on the outside instead of falling on the inside? Well, the idea is to take your wall down as you take your floor out. It's not a very safe practice of what we call the business of gutting a building. Taking out your floor and walls and just leaving the skeleton standing. The proper way to take it down is as you take your floor out and your walls down, you come down with your outside wall simultaneously. That way you'll never get in any trouble.

While we're still standing on a part of the building, about four or five floors up, but over here in front of us is that hole I was talking about, and that's all gone. Is there some fear that this part of the building will fall? No, there's no fear of that because you have your steel in the walls over here. It's all supported with columns and each section over here is independent of one another. Outside of the air hammers, which dig into this concrete and steel and the bricks, what do you have for tools that the men work with? Well, in this particular job, the air hammer is the big thing. We've had as many as 18, 19 of them going at one time. Of course, you always need your standard tools such as your bars and your picks and your shovels and your axes. That's a bottom. Your torches, settling torches. Now, Marshall, we're also looking over here at about six or seven workers, and as you mentioned, some of them wheeled the shovels. And as the air hammer digs into that concrete and brick over here, it leaves a pile of rubble laying on the floor, then the scoop shovels go to work, and they dump it in a hole over here. Where's that going to down below? It's going right into a gondola. We have cars right

in it. We have several cars spotted right below us, and all the rubbish is going into them. You mean there's a railroad car down below there? That's correct. And we have to keep the tracks clear every night so they can haul out their fly ash. So you dump all of your refuse right down in that hole into the gondola? Well, we don't dump all of it in there. The refuge from the train shed would normally fall on the tracks over here in damage, and that's the stuff we're throwing into the cars. The rest of it we're throwing over the wall, where our crane and our front loader can get it and load it right into our six wheel trucks. What if I could talk to one of the boys that are over here working with the air hammers? Well, I would suggest that we talk to our, probably our oldest employee. He's our foreman on the job, JW Smith, who's been with the firm over 30 years, and I think he can brief you in on some things. JW, could he come over here a minute? Is this one of the toughest jobs that you've ever worked on in your 31 years? I'm just about to tough his job for how much we had since I've been working with him. Out of my whole 51 year, this is about the toughest one we had. Tell us about that job you had to work over the weekend, JW. Over the weekend? When

you started on Friday night, you were talking about a while ago? Yes. I came in from a... I think it was Camelville, Michigan, I think it was. I came in from Camelville, Michigan, got in on a Friday morning. Well, got in on a Friday morning, they called me around 12 o 'clock. I left the house at 12, got over to the crane company, around 1 o 'clock. Went to work on the Friday evening. Went Friday night. Friday sat the all day. Saturday night. Sunday night. Up until Monday morning, around 4 o 'clock, that's when I went back home. With no sleep, no sleep. You were pretty tired when you got home? I was tired when I went to another job that next morning. You did, that's right. Why were you such a hurry to get that job done? Well, it had to be done. I'm the kind of the people that work in the crane company. This job had to be done so that the people would be ready for me. It would be ready for Monday morning. What's your favorite job on the construction gang here? The wrecking crew. The air hammer or the shovel or what? Well, my favorite job

right now is torch. The torch. Yeah, it's not a lean torch. That's not a lean torch. That's right. Have you been working with a torch on this job? Hey, but since I've been here. What do you use? The torch on. The steel beams up there. Steel beams. The gritties. And all that's over the steel that's in the hoppers. How many men do you have working for you over here, JW? Well, right now. I have a rack. Let's see. Looks like at least 15. 16. 16, man? Yeah, 16, man. 16, man. Well, JW, thank you a lot for talking to us. And you're doing a real good job up here wrecking this building. And I hope you don't fall in that hole over there. Well, I don't worry about falling. The only thing I worry about is my men. Long as they saw, right? I'm all right. Well, I don't feel the longer. Longer. I'm better at field, see? OK, JW. Then I'm just about ready to go. So higher up is better you are. That's right. OK, JW. Marshal, I think I'll go back over here to Butte Routenberg

and talk about where we should go next. Now, the next step perhaps is at crane. How about it, bud? Well, I think that would be the proper place to crane. And then from there, we'll go down to the basement. Right. Well, I'm sure that you could hear in the background the sound of that ball hitting against that concrete floor. Now, bud, I think we ought to go over here to Marshal the job superintendent again who has walked down the stairs with us. Marshal, we're over here on about, well, I guess it looks like about the second floor of the building. And your crane operator is wielding that big ball. Now, what's that ball made out of? That ball is made out of cast iron. You, when weighs approximately 1200 pounds, it's one of the lightest balls that we use. That little ball weighs 1200 pounds. That's right. It's awful small for that weight, isn't it? Well, that's one of the smallest ones that we have. They run up to about three tons that we have used here. Now, your crane operator is dropping that from about 12 feet. Is there any special reason

why it goes just that distance? Well, there's no particular reason. He's able to break the floor from about 12 feet, so there's no reason for him to go up any higher. You know, I think possibly Marshal would be better if I went up in that elevator into that crane with the operator and talked to him for a little bit. It's well. What's his name? Joel Ligler. Joel Ligler. Well, let me walk up here into the crane itself and talk to Joel who's up here wheeling the operation. I hope we can hear each other up here, Joel. I can go. What if you could cut it off for just a minute? Well, that gives us a little better background sound here and we can talk for a minute. We were talking to Marshal down here about that ball, weighs about 1200 pounds, he said. Approximately, yes. Any reason why you go up only about 12 feet or do you usually go higher or what? Well, we do. According to the thickness of the concrete, but here on the vibration, I'd ask him raise it too high, see? I raised it up about eight feet, so that the building doesn't vibrate. This is not tied into what they cut it loose, but

nevertheless, there's still vibration from it. Well, now, Joel, what about times when you have to use the ball to swing it up against the side of a building? Did you do that here at all? Well, very little of it, because it's just a brick wall, a few taps and it goes through. That one in front there, we haven't got any now. That was four feet thick, and that one took a little first weighting with the ball to loosen the mortar in it. Is this one of your tougher jobs? Joel, is this an easy one as far as that? Well, this is just regular routine. I imagine you've had some pretty dangerous experiences with this ball operation. Have a chew it, fires. Well, they come in very handy at a fire where you can reach it, and the idea of having a small ball, what we say we can do tricks with the ball, we can throw it out almost as far as we want to reach obstructions that we couldn't ordinarily reach with our bucket to put on the side. What was one of your worst fires that you ever watched? Well, I didn't watch it. I got there after the fire was over. That was the Haber fire on North Avenue. I think there was 34 lives lost in that one. You had to bring the bodies out? Yes.

Well, I cleared the debris all around it, and so the firemen could get in with the stretcher and then they'd lay the bodies in the stretcher and carry them out. I'd make a passageway for them so they could get in and out. Well, that hissing sound you heard, of course, was a settling torch. And the worker is down here cutting through a huge steel beam. How big is that beam, Marshall? Well, you, that's about, that beam's about 10 foot long. It's an 18 inch beam. It weighs about 65 pounds to the foot. Now, he'll cut this end and then we'll really go down to cut the other end. He'll cut this end free and then he'll go cut the other end free and we'll drop it. It's about an eight or ten foot drop to the floor. This is the area right now that Joe just finished balling and now we're going to remove the steel to make way for the high lift to load the rubbish out below. How many of settling torches do you have working on the job,

Marshall? Well, at the present time we have five torches going. And they're going practically all the time. Well, we like to keep them that way. Well, now, Marshall, we've got this particular job up here finished and the debris is being pushed down here and I can see a big lift truck over here picking it up. Right, you, that's the basement that that, the end loader or front loader or high lift, whichever you want to call it. He's loading up our six wheel trucks, cleaning the basement out, room clean. From here, we take our trucks and we take them over to the Edison dump where they're making a parking lot, roughly about 400 yards away from here. Well, what do you say you and I go downstairs and on the basement floor and talk a little bit about that lift truck? Okay, that'd be swell. Well, that's a sound of that big lift truck that we were talking about and we're down on the

basement of this building and there's not much left to see. The man who is working it is just about finished his operation down here. There's not much left to pick up. What's the next move here now? Where is he going from here? Well, from here, you, he's going to go over the north wall where Joe's bawling right now. I suppose you could hear it in the background. As soon as he gets a little more of that bald -hankle gover with his high lift and scoop it up and throw it in our trucks. That lift truck has really some machine. It's quite an operation. It has about a two and a half cubic yard lift to it. About five or six scoops from that. You have a six -wheel truck loaded and on the way. Well, now we watched a little while ago as this four -cliff truck scooped up a huge amount of bricks, concrete, dirt, senders and whatever we could get in there and dumped it into the truck. A little while ago, the truck pulled away so it just about reached this destination. And I think we ought to go out there and do a little recording of that operation. Okay, let's go. Well, we've arrived out to the place now where they are dumping that refuse from the building that they're knocking down. And the reason you're not hearing

too much noise is the fact that it's lunchtime and the boys are taking off for lunch. But we can see that they're grading off the place. Now, what's your operation here, Marshall? You, we have our six -wheel trucks dumping the debris. We have a big HD -19 tractor over here that's shoving the debris into the hole and leveling off. The Edison is bringing in senders that we're unloading for them and the bulldozers also leveling those off. And the finished product will be a contractor's parking lot. Well, I think that pretty much well wraps up the story of the wrecking operation here at Edison Company. But I want to ask you one final question and get back over to Butt Routenberg. What are they going to do with that building once it's knocked down or the space? And how about this area right here? Well, perhaps we better let Mr. Sid Griffin. He's the station construction engineer answer that question. I think he'd be more qualified. Well, Sid, what about it? What are you going to do with the building first? This old boiler room, which is being wrecked, will be the new turbine room for a 305 ,000 KW unit. The boiler to run to

produce the steam for this unit will be located where we stand, not where this wrecking is going on. What was in the building before? There were old boilers. There were boilers that were put in in 1903. Okay, Sid, thanks a million. And now to close out our shoulder to get back over here to our original guide, Butt Routenberg. And Butt, when we opened up, we were talking about some of the famous jobs at the Speedway Wrecking Company has accomplished. And we said that we were going to get back to it and talk about some of the old mansions that have been torn down in the last two or three years. Why don't you tell us about it? Well, let's go first to the most noted one, such as the Edith Rock fellow McCarmick building at a thousand Lake Shore Drive at 41 rooms. That was quite a little job, quite a show place in its time. Crane Mansion in 1955 that we wrecked. The Mecca building at 34th and State, once a show place, then finally was reduced to a tenement building. But how do you feel about tearing down not only old mansions, but also a building like this one at Edison that you know that somebody worked on maybe 55,

60, maybe 75 years ago? It feels great. More out in the better. We like it, tougher the job, the better we like them. You don't sympathize with anybody that used to work on those buildings or somebody that might have owned them. Well, I sympathize with some of the owners that had them, that hate to see them go down more for sentimental reason, more than anything else. But you're not sentimental. Well, we're not sentimental when it comes to a wrecking job. This has been the story of the Speedway wrecking company, a story of Chicago's progress. This is Hugh Hill speaking.