By The Scene staff
Students and employees returning to Forest Park this fall will hardly recognize campus if they enter from the east.
Workers are largely finished demolishing a large, four-story brick section of the main building’s east wing, better known as A and B towers. They’ve been replaced with a giant pile of rubble. The new Center for Nursing and Health Sciences is now clearly visible from College Drive.
“(The demolition) went as planned,” said Ken Kempf, manager of the St. Louis Community College engineering and design staff. “We really didn’t have any ‘wow-we-didn’t-expect-that’ type of moments. It was pretty smooth.”
The COVID-19 pandemic canceled on-site classes beginning in March and sent most students and faculty members home for remote learning. But employees of Ahrens Contracting, which STLCC hired to demolish the towers, worked throughout the summer, except for a couple of coronavirus-related delays with subcontractors, supplies and the permitting process.
“The final committee that had to sign off on the demolition permit didn’t meet for a month, and then they finally met by Zoom, and I guess there was some controversy on whether it was legal and whether they could make a decision,” Kempf said.
‘FASCINATING’ PROCESS
The only employees on the Forest Park campus this summer were those in “essential” positions, so it was eerily quiet inside buildings.
Outside, people got used to the constant noise of excavators and other heavy equipment and the sight of men in fluorescent vests and hard hats walking around in a large demolition zone surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Campus police officer James Kenner found the demolition process “fascinating.”
“Normally, when they tear down buildings, they either implode them or use a big wrecking ball,” he said. “But the foreman told me they couldn’t use either method. They couldn’t risk damaging the new building. They had this machine with a big alligator-like mouth, and it had steel teeth and it would just bite sections out (of the towers).”
‘BITTERSWEET’ CHANGE
STLCC spent $39 million to construct the 96,000-square-foot, four-story Center for Nursing and Health Sciences, north of A Tower and west of the college’s physical education building. It’s mostly glass with brick accents.
The center houses classrooms, laboratories and offices for nursing, dental hygiene and eight other health-relation programs. It opened in the fall of 2019, as workers were preparing for demolition of A and B towers.
“It went much faster than I expected,” said Campus Live Manager Donivan Foster, who’s been working on campus two days a week this summer. “Every week, you could see that they were making progress.”
Foster said the history of A and B towers, which dated back to the 1960s, made the demolition “bittersweet.”
“But it’s exciting, and I like change,” he said. “I’ve heard so many people say that they wanted the ‘front door’ or the entrance to campus come to life. I get a sense that the community is excited, too. They think it looks really nice.”