After collapse, entire 5th Ave. building being demolished

ANTIGO — The multi-story 5th Ave. building that was partially destroyed Monday afternoon after one of its brick walls collapsed earlier in the day is now in the process of being completely demolished, City of Antigo Building Inspector and Zoning Administrator Beth McCarthy said Wednesday afternoon.

The decision was made by city officials after an assessment of the building, located at 701 5th Ave., by a structural engineer.

“In his personal opinion, he couldn’t declare it safe to stand,” McCarthy said. “He couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t fall, so we’re looking out for the health and safety of the citizens.”

The hub intersection of 5th Avenue and Superior is currently closed to traffic and seems likely to remain that way at least until the building is completely removed, which McCarthy said should be later this week, barring any unforeseen issues.

“They’re planning road closures on the fly as the project progresses,” McCarthy said. “They won’t open them until we are confident that no debris will fall into the road.

We can’t give a timeline on that.”

Behind the taped-off parking lot just south of the building much of Wednesday afternoon, onlookers gathered to watch a massive backhoe, often trundling harrowingly atop a growing pile of rubble, as it meticulously knocked chunks of the building free from the structure.

One large reason for the caution of the machine’s operator, an employee of the excavating contractor Krueger and Steinfest, is the building’s proximity to local dentist Stanley Brown’s office, with which it shares a wall.

“My wall, the inside of my practice, I’m studded right up against that wall, so they’ve got 300 tires on my roof, and then they’ve got plywood on top of the tires to act as a shock absorber and to protect my roof in case debris falls on it,” Brown said as a spatter of debris rained down onto a kind of plywood awning workers had constructed as a shield directly along the edge of the larger one being gutted next to his. “They’re going in and every so far there’s those big metal trusses. So they’re taking them out one at a time and going back to the trusses and moving them this way to try to preserve my building. This guy in the backhoe, he’s an artist.”

Brown said what happened to the neighboring building, constructed in 1905, did not surprise him.

“I knew this day would come someday. It switched owners half a dozen or more times since I’ve been here, and nobody ever puts any money into it,” he said. “Fortunately I’m insured. That’s going to save me — it really is.”

Jen Zima, who was sitting at a table across the street outside Offsides Sports Bar with her young son and several others, said she was worried the building could fall onto the one next to Brown’s, where her niece lives in a second floor apartment.

“My niece is on her way back from Florida right now, so she has probably seen Facebook pictures and stuff about this, but has no idea what the parking lot’s going to look like when she gets back home,” Zima said. “Her and her boyfriend have been living there for two years now, maybe three. So my biggest worry is any of it collapsing that way. I’d rather see it collapse into the highway, because within 24 hours, they’ll have it cleaned up off the highway. If it goes against that other building, there could be people left homeless, so it’s kind of like, ‘Yikes.’”

Sheldon Hable watched the backhoe’s progress Wednesday in a lawn chair with his friends and two sons from behind his business, Galactic Gaming. He echoed the statements of several others interviewed by the Antigo Journal when he said other aging buildings on 5th Ave. could suffer the same fate as the one being leveled.

“I think it’s going to happen more and more as time goes on. All the brick structures downtown, the mortar just deteriorates after a while. This building here will be next,” Hable said, pointing to a gray building with busted glass windows not far behind him. He went on to explain, though, that he does not believe the outer wall collapse that led to the 701 5th Ave. building being demolished will have a huge impact on property values on the street. “It can’t really hurt much because I’m sure that building was sold cheap like all the rest of them on 5th Ave. They’re all run down. They’ve been bled dry — people sucking the money out of them and not putting money back in. All of them were starting to get to the point where they can’t be fixed. The window broken out back here, it’s been four years that has been broken.”

From across the street, Zima also pointed the building out.

“If you look at that taller building with all those busted windows, I’m pretty sure there’s a business downstairs, but it’s like, ‘What is going on upstairs?’” she said. “Obviously there’s busted windows, so there’s probably rats in there. There’s definitely bats in there. It’s like, ‘My God.’ And I look at the building where my niece is living and I see the bricks are kind of falling out. So is there going to be a shift after this one comes down that causes that wall to come down? Do I hate to see that happen in Antigo? I do, because a lot of these buildings are very old, and it kind of makes our town a little historic, but what do you do?”