Get ready to rubble with Jeff Byles' smashing history
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Meet Jacob Volk, immigrant son of a butcher, who rose to become the Dandy of Devastation, a wrecker of Herculean proportions in early 20th-century New York, a city constantly remaking itself by pulling down one building to replace it with another.
Volk pulled down the best places and was proud of it, reports Jeff Byles in "Rubble," his book about the history of the wrecking business.
He never passed a tall building without giving it an appraising glance, Byles writes of Volk, one of the book's many fascinating characters, from Joshua and his blaring destruction of the walls of Jericho to the Loizeaux family, whose work regularly blasts its way onto TV news.
When Volk was demolishing a Vanderbilt mansion in Manhattan he was asked if he planned to salvage the carved stone fireplace or the Moorish billiards room for his own home.
"Listen," he replied, "am I a piker? You won't see second-hand stuff in my house."
Loizeaux
Today's big name in demolition is probably the Maryland-based Loizeaux family, whose projects have included razing Seattle's Kingdome and finishing off the Alfred Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, where a truck bomb killed 168 people in 1995.
Family founder Jack Loizeaux, a forester who got his start blasting tree stumps, once told an audience that he and his family had set off more big bangs than anybody on earth in peacetime.
Speaking to a church congregation in an effort to reassure them that blasting nearby wouldn't damage their beautiful windows, Loizeaux added that he wasn't shy about appealing to the almighty. "If you did what we did, you'd pray a lot too," Byles quotes him as saying.
There was no applause and nary a cheer when a round of charges brought an end to the Murrah building, Byles observes. Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating commented, "You really wanted to kick the rubble and say, 'There, it's over.'"
Artsy
For a massive personality of a different type, Byles introduces Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, the self-described "artist-demolitionist" who supervised the pulling down of thousands of homes and buildings in Paris in the late 1800s to make way for today's city of broad avenues, parks and monuments.
During the course of 17 years, Haussmann dislodged 350,000 people and their homes, factories, shops and taverns. Having done so without causing a revolution, he counted the effort a success.
Photographer Charles Marville documented the doomed areas with images of the city's tiny, twisting streets and tenements. In the photo catalog are lists of streets, Rue Saint-Christophe, Rue des Trois-Canettes, Rue du Haut-Moulin and many others, each with the haunting notation "disparue" -- "disappeared."
Byles moves on to the sacking of New York's old Pennsylvania Station, the destruction of infamous housing projects including St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe, the remaking of Detroit and the destruction of the World Trade Center in a riveting book that is by turns sad, nostalgic and humorous, and fascinating throughout.
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