2/25/2012

Remember the Brecker (1911-2012)

Demolition crews arrived at the City-owned Brecker Building on Friday morning.  Bricks began falling from the buildings facade during the last few weeks and City officials decided to have the building demolished.  The City of Buffalo is paying Apollo Demolition $320,000 to haul one of the last spectacular steel reinforced concrete buildings on the City's East Side to the landfill.  The Brecker is located at 630 High (google map).
untitled-4837
I've collected a number of additional images from Friday afternoon in this Brecker Building demolition flickr archive.
If you're not already familiar with this historic building and some of the stories contained in its walls, please check out this post from earlier in the month:  Brecker Building: Loft Living or Landfill. Once the preparations are complete the demolition is scheduled to begin Saturday morning.  While the demolition  crews prepared to demolish the building a Facebook Event was generated - Remember the Brecker.   

While discussing the schedule with the demolition crew, I learned that this emergency demolition is also a controlled demolition.  This means that nothing can be salvaged.  When I was in the building two weeks ago I remembered noticing the transom windows and their square prismatic pieces.  These are headed for the landfill.  While thinking about the Brecker's additional architectural detail and storied past I was struck with fact that Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Last Fine Time (1990) is set one block away on the corner of Herman and Sycamore.

Please join us on Saturday morning as we bear witness to the destruction of the Brecker Building.   
_____________________________________________________________________________________

1 comment:

Who's going to sue? said...

$320,000 of public money -- wasted -- because the City did nothing during the last seven years that they owned it.

The government as trustee owes the duty of using the care of a reasonably prudent man in protecting the building against decay and deterioration caused by use, by the elements, by catastrophe, or otherwise.... Under the common law of trusts, the first duty of a trustee must be to preserve the property intact. To do this, he must not suffer the building to waste or diminish, or fall out of repair.

A government's failure to act reasonably to preserve the property will also support a claim for permissive waste, under the law of property.