Bank Building Demolition Underway

The first chunks of a 1948 art moderne former bank building at 80 Elm St. have begun disappearing as a demolition crew makes way for a planned new 132-room hotel.

On Monday morning and afternoon, a handful of yellow-hardhat-wearing demolition workers cleared and sorted debris from the back of the mid-century Elm Street structure.

A bent black-and-yellow construction excavator and a long, silver water truck stood stationary on the site’s Orange Street parking lot in front of a jumble of concrete and steel where once stood the building’s second-floor back wall.

Spinnaker Real Estate Partners plans to build a six-story Hilton Garden Inn on the site as one of a handful of large-scale developments that company is currently working on Downtown.

But before it can starting building that hotel, Spinnaker must first knock down the late Art Deco structure that used to house Webster Bank — a building that local historic preservationists fought in vain to protect, and are now using as a catalyst to promote the passage of a citywide preservation ordinance.

Spinnaker began demolition last week after winning demolition permit approval from the city’s Building Department at the end of October.

The general contractor on the demolition project is the Farmington-based KBE Building Corporation, while the actual demolition is being performed by the Milford-based subcontractor Charter Oak Environmental LLC, Spinnaker Director of Development Frank Caico told the Independent Monday.

Caico said around a dozen demolition workers in total will be on site doing the work of taking down the building over the next few weeks.

The demolition permit issued by the city on Oct. 31 states that the projected total cost of knocking down the building will be around $175,000.

Caico estimated that demolition should be complete towards the end of December or early next year. Then comes several months’ worth of site work before the beginning of the actual vertical construction of the new hotel, which he estimated should take around 14 to 16 months to complete.

“What started last week was really the separation of our building from the 200 Orange St. building,” Caico said.

“We literally had to do that work by hand,” he said, and not with demolition machines, ​“because of the sensitivity of being right next to the city’s building.”

Now Spinnaker and the demolition contract will be focused on taking down the main building and the rest of the attached structures on the site with large demolition machines, and separating and segregating demolition debris materials.

The large excavator on site is for actually demolishing the building, while the water truck is there for dust control, he said.

He said Spinnaker has also installed a variety of erosion control measures, and has received city sign offs for the demolition’s logistical plan, showing surrounding barriers and traffic impact, as part of the larger permit issued by the Building Department.

“It’s an urban site,” Caico said. ​“And we do have adjacent buildings.” He said the company has taken predemolition surveys of those buildings to evaluate their existing conditions and to make sure that the demolition work doesn’t adversely impact neighbors.

“We’ve taken all the precautions necessary,” he said.