Wrecking balls may have gone out of style, but cable hookups still put on a good Houston show. A reader with a front-row view of the soon-to-be north end of CityCentre shows us how, in videos and a photo showing the continuing section-by-section disappearance of the 1977 office building at 908 Town & Country Blvd. known as Town & Country V.
First, demolition workers weaken some of the building’s steel support beams by heating them with torches and making a few strategic snips. Then they attach one end of a cable to the beam:
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. . . and the other to an excavator parked at a safe distance below. A few yanks on the chain, and another section of the building falls.
The video at top shows a pull from Monday. Here’s another section coming down this morning, in slightly more spectacular display:
Swamplot featured the fall of another section of the same building last week. Workers used the same method to dispatch the nearby Town & Country III in April.
- Previously on Swamplot: Taking the Edge off Town & Country V;Â Underground Parking Garage near CityCentre Replaced with Garage-Shaped Lake;Â How To Topple That Last Bit of Seventies Mod Office Building Without Letting It Topple You;Â Smashing Views of a Half-Eaten Katy Fwy. Office Building from CityCentre Five;Â Midway Fences In Empty 1970s Office Park Where 3 More CityCentre Towers Might Sprout
Photo and videos: Swamplot inbox
I worked in that building from 1982 or so till 1984 or so.
It sort of breaks my heart to see it come down. That was one of my first professional jobs.
So now some guys go back into what’s standing, heat some beams, do some snipping and hook a chain up again? Sounds like a way for death row inmates to get their sentences commuted to time served.