PORTSMOUTH — Will Renaud started warming the engines in a pair of excavators at 7 a.m. Wednesday, to start the job of demolishing a 44-year-old building at the corner of Hanover Street and Maplewood Avenue, built by attorneys Paul McEachern and the late Robert Shaines.
"It's going to look a lot different when it's gone," he said, while onlookers began to gather for the dusty show. "This is an easy demolition. It will probably take three hours to take it all down."
The job ended up taking five hours and Renaud said prep work included engineering, site plans and approvals.
"There's a lot to it," he said about the job which cost the owner more than $100,000.
The Provident Bank bought the property a year ago for $3 million and plans to use the lot for a four-story, 40,000-square-foot development, with commercial spaces below and 10 condominiums on the upper floors. Renaud said he'll be doing the site work, including digging the foundation.
He started the demolition by first knocking down the Hanover Street side, including a glass-walled office over a carport. By 9:15 a.m., bricks the lawyers had imported from Canada were stripped off the side of the building like rows of Legos and steel support beams were tossed to the ground.
While the smaller of the two backhoes supported a wall on the Hanover Street side of the 25 Maplewood Ave. building, the larger one ripped into the building, knocking down brick walls, grabbing and tossing steel beams and crushing glass windows. Wood, insulation and wall board were nudged into piles and the excavator's "hydraulic thumb" was maneuvered to hammer at walls and ceilings.
Heads turned in passing cars and pedestrians stopped to take cellphone pictures.
The building adjacent to the Worth parking lot was saved for last and by mid afternoon, the building was a pile of rubble and twisted metal beams. Renaud said he had a team of six on the job which went without incident. Over the next week, he said, his team will start separating the materials and hauling it away.
Renaud said there was a lot of metal in the building, which will be recycled after it’s hauled to his company’s Eliot, Maine, headquarters. The Montreal bricks Shaines and McEachern imported will be crushed in a pit and also recycled, he said.
McEachern said it was 44 years ago, the height of urban renewal in the city’s North End, when the Blue Coral Diner was demolished for what became his and Shaines' law office. He said the Portsmouth Co-op Bank had originally planned to build a new bank on the site, but backed out at the time when, “There wasn’t a lot going on in Portsmouth.”
He said their law office was on Congress Street, they decided to build a new one on the Maplewood Avenue site and used the bank’s building plans for the design. McEachern said the plans were drawn by the late architect Don Dennis and he and Shaines added a wing.
Now in a Pease International Tradeport office, McEachern said last week that Provident Bank's new plans “will probably be a much better use” for the site.