East Liberty revisited
Back in May, I posted about a Pittsburgh First Friday Arts event that was held in the East Liberty section of the city. If you are new here and interested you might want to check out my later post that Corbin liked about attending a small hip-hop show in that same neighborhood that weekend.
Anyway, as I was driving through East Liberty the other day I noticed that they are finally taking the building down. It had been used for some fire-fighting exercises in June and it appears that a lot of the interior walls had been removed, too, because you could see all the way through from one side to the other when you would drive near the building.
The demolition of this building is interesting. I thought they would do a Controlled Demolition type of thing, but that is not the case. They are knocking the building down. It is so cool to watch. They have this enormous crane, and instead of a wrecking ball they have a huge squared-off horseshoe. This is used either to chisel away at the building, with slight up and down motions by the crane, or just knocking into it to loosen things up. At the vertical walls it chips away downward until much of it is separated from the horizontal structure (like the ceilings and floors). This either falls away several floors at a time, or they have to knock into it a few times to get it to peel away. While I was sitting in my car watching this for an hour (Myles was napping and I DID put money in the meter), I got some photos and video clips of it. I wish I had Randy's camera because his HP camera has this feature where you can take several pictures in a second. And as my timing is always great, there was a great money shot where about eight or ten floors of wall peeled away in one piece, but my contact lens about 30 seconds before that shifted inexplicably in my eye and I was digging in my eye when it happened. With my good eye I watched it. It was cool.
This photo kind of shows what they were doing. The horseshoe just chipped away at the meeting of the walls immediately to its right. It had alread separated that wall from the floors it was connected to (you can see the cables and rebar dangling to the right of the wall). This wallwas not falling away so they were taking the horseshoe and banging it into the wall to loosen it further. It had this great ringing tone when it hit in a certain way.
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