‘They were never going to do it’

Ray Ellison knows a thing or two about salvaging Lansing demolition sites — he’s been doing it since the 1960s.

He salvaged the Boys Training School, which was established in 1856. He salvaged the Benjamin Davis House, which was on the National Register of Historic Places when it was demolished. He has salvaged dozens of historic houses, a Victorian hotel and a Darius Moon house.

On one building, he recalls slipping a crane operator $50 and riding the crane down to lift cast iron pillars out of a pit.

“I know big equipment, and I know what to do with it,” Ellison said.

Ellison said it was clear as soon as the excavators tore into the west wing that University of Michigan Health-Sparrow was not going to save old Eastern’s cupola.

“They were never going to do it,” he said. “That was obvious. Whoever said they were trying — they didn’t.”

“If they were trying to save it, they would have had somebody look at it and decide what they were going to do beforehand. They could have done a little forethought.”

John Foren, a spokesperson for UM-Sparrow, said the crew “took special steps” Thursday morning “to try to retrieve the cupola” but that its condition made it unsalvageable.

“It basically shattered as soon as we tried to retrieve it,” Foren said.

“The wood framing was rotted, and the cupola was made of small sections rather than one large piece,” he said. “That made it more fragile.”

Ellison called the statement “scrubbing the news.”

“It wouldn’t have been standing for all those years if it had rotted,” he said. He added that nothing he salvaged from Boys Training School, on Lansing’s east side, had rotted, and that the cupola could have been saved even if it had rotted by bracing the inside.

The demolition crew’s salvage effort consisted of knocking the rooftop over so that the cupola hung at an angle, then trying to scoop it up with an excavator bucket. The cupola shattered when the excavator touched it.

Ellison said the effort was doomed to fail.

“There was no way to preserve it at that point,” he said. “They didn’t have the equipment to even think about it. I could see that from the beginning — you can’t take a piece like that down with an excavator. That’s a demolition tool.”

Ray Ellison

Ellison said the process to save the cupola would have begun before demolition began on the west wing.

“I would have hired a HI Ball crane,” he said.

He said he would have cut a hole in the roof from the inside and freed the cupola with battery-powered saws. Then, he would have have strapped dense foam and 2x12s around the outside of the cupola to prevent pressure on the wooden cage, x-braced the inside on all four sides for stability and lifted it off the roof by crane with four heavy-duty cargo straps.

“It’s an easy lift,” he said. “I’ve seen it done before, but you’d have to have the biggest crane around.”

Bradley Bridgewater, a sales estimator at HI Ball Co., said the rental would cost around $2,000, though he stressed that it was not a professional estimate.

He also said doing it in half a day “looked pretty doable.”

Onlookers said the demolition crew destroyed artifacts even when they would have been easily salvaged. Bill Castanier watched an intact piece of concrete art be crushed by excavators after it fell 6 or 8 feet from the building, probably because of demolition virbations.

“It just popped off,” Castanier said. “I couldn’t believe how easy it came off, because I thought it would have been significant to remove. And I thought, ‘Holy cow, that could have been saved easily.’”

But the crew “just scraped it into the rubble pile” and crushed it, Castanier said.

Ellison said the way UM-Sparrow handled the demolition showed they did not care about the community.

“The carelessness is just egregious.”

LEO V. KAPLAN