Daily News from New York, New York • 738

DAILY tfEWS, tHtmSDAY, JUNE 11, 1959 46 rn 'A JSP. Ml lL- I 4tfaasfa 4. VHQf 1 Mill: Took mm By PAUL SAFFRON (First of two articles) THEY'RE bringing down the house all over town in the biggest wrecking spree in American history. Wrecking contractors, Buildings- Commissioner Peter J. and husky house wreckers agree that there has never been anything like it.

Business was never more smashing. With the zeal of Joshua, who was boss man of the demolition gang on the Jericho project, wreckers are clearing the ground sometimes whole blocks at a time for housing and office space. More modern office space is expected to be finished in Manhattan this year than in any other year in the city's history. fn tr 11, man brothers who never set foot in the Ritz-Carlton hotel except to tear it down, the Lipsett brothers of Third Ave. el and liner Nor-mandie scrapping fame and others.

The junk-to-splendor story is familiar. Many a gfimy junkman who started out with horse and rickety wagon and later settled down in a junkyard came into his own even before the last war, when his scrap iron was in great demand. Garson Kanin's long-run comedy, "Born Yesterday," which opened on Broadway in 1946, pictures a junkman in an unfavorable light. The play, with political slant, tells of a bad fellow who pyramids junkyards and "buys" himself a Senator. NOW THEY SPEAK ENGLISH AT MEETINGS Truer is the real-life story of Charles Fraiman of Bucks County, who found gold in junk.

lie died early this vear at 74, having willed his $250,000 estate to Yeshiva University. He was an avid reader of the Bible who had respect for learning. The muscles of the wrecking industry are modern machines and the 2,000 tough men of little-known Local 95, House Wreckers Union. Their main purpose in life is to knock the joint over and today they're working at full time and speed. From its beginnings on the lower East Side 40 years ago, Local 95 has consisted almost entirely of Slavic workers, many of them newly-arrived immigrants, mostly Russians who spoke mostly Russian.

Today the union is still dominated by DAIIXa NEWS SPECIAL FEATURE 7 ii i I Ar The average New York building dies at 35, some die younger. That's the opinion of David A. Click. He has been in wrecking for a half century (he started at 15). Glick, in partnership with Louis H.

Bowden at International Wrecking Co, which tore down the St Paul Building, with Associated Wreckers Corp, recalls that the Huntington mansion, Fifth Ave. and 57th St, was razed in 1926 and replaced with another structure which in turn was torn down and another built in its place all in the space of 25 years. In the Park Ave. headquarters of Lipsett. enterprises, Morris Lipsett, the president, observed: "The midtown is turning from residential to commercial.

There is no doubt about the trend. The wrecking nusiness has been at peak in the past two years because of the change in the face of the city." FAID 33CG TO RAZE THIRD AVENUE EL The Lipsett brothers, Morris and Julius, five years ago paid the city $330,000 for the privilege of tearing down the Third Ave. el. I They are putting the finishing touches to the Eagle Pencil 18 buildings in a square block on E. 14th St.

The job is directed by Harry Avirom. Lipsett started on Guaranty Trust's 12-story building at Fifth Ave. and 44th St. The masonry will be removed and the steel skeleton utilized for a facelift. Lipsett also is dismantling the carrier Enterprise, which took part in some of the greatest battles in the Pacific.

Lipsett nnce owned the largest private navy in the world, through the purchase of. the battleships New Mexico, Idaho and Wyoming, and nearly got into a war with the city of Newark. That city'a fireboats squirted water to prevent tugs from hauling the New Mexico into port because of objections to making a junkpile of beautiful Newark." Peace was finally made and Lipsett crews sliced the battle wagons into pieces. The wrecking industry is still tall ing about the case of Ihe gas tank, a Lipsett original. Asked to dismantle the huge otlilities cylinder, Morris studied the job for a while.

The important factor in estimating the job's cost as the thousands of feet of scaffolding for the workers to stand on. Morris filled the tank with water and put workers on rafts inside. "We siphoned off the water and the workmen were lowered grad ually as they cut the tank down. he recalled the other day. The trick saved about $38,000.

(Tomorrow It's a dangerous voay to make a dollar, bat tha mrecherm cam tecA for mare. (NEWS fotos by Bill Meurer) Wrecker Al remove floor beam from demolished tenement on 41t St. near Third Ave. to make way for new office building. X'd window in building (background) indicate rooms behind are empty.

Dismantled doors are et up as sidewalk safety bar-' rier during demolition of old buildings at Fifth Ave. and 15th St. Commissioner Reidy "Larger buildings arc being wrecked" Russians, but English is spoken at meetings. Like the last frontier of the nation's westward expansion, Manhattan came to the end of the vacant-lot stage after World War II. It was a different story after World War when there was a building boom and land was plentiful, says the Ciy Planning Commission.

"Renewal of old sections, the planners say, 'will become correspondingly Important." That means more wrecking. Wreckers are flattening hundreds of buildings for the $250 million Lineoln Square development, which will include the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Fordham University campus job and eight blocks of housing. The demolition is more extensive than the tearing down for Stuyvesant Town, which was considered the greatest civilian building demolition of all time. LACK OF LAND DELAYS SOME JOBS Contractors are looking ahead to the job of dismantling the rear of Grand Central Terminal. The front part containing the rotunda will remain.

But the six-story office building in the rear will be razed and a $100 million development, Grand Central City, consisting of a 50-story building containing three theatres, a parking garage and other facilities, will take its place. It will be the world's greatest commercial office building with three million square feet of office space. Although some housing has been held up by lack of land, razing of old city structures has been booming since the end of the last war. During this first i auarter. i.iil buiidines were demolished (commercial, residen tial and public), 425 of them in Manhattan.

The citywide total for 1958 was 2,464, with 991 for Manhattan. A special survey on wrecking the city, 1 94 l-ba, prepared by the Buildings Department, shows, among other things, that more buildings were leveled 1941 than in 1958! But Buildings Com missioner Reidy emphasized that the figures in the survey "do not give a true over-all picture of the extent of demolition. "The department's figures in dicate the number of demolitions not the type of buildings. A one-story garage receives the same statistical space as a skyscraper." "For instance," Reidy added. "the citywide total of demolished buildings for 1941 was 3,094, compared to 1958's 2,464." The important thing to note, he said.

echoing the wrecking contractors' enthusiastic appraisal of the cur rent wrecking boom, is that ''larger and higher buildings are being wrecked these days." Toppling larger and higher buildings was what Harry Drach man of Drachman Demolition Co. had in tnmd the other dav when Jie said that wrecking is better now than it has ever been. On the job on the west side of Park Ave, where his crews are clearing the blocks from 50th to 51st and 51st to 52d for two skyscrapers, Harry said: "Business was never so good. Where we once took down one building we are now handling whole blocks at a time." KAYOED THE TOMBS. BRIDGE OF SIGHS 1 The blockbuster is one of three brothers and junk gave them their start.

Harry, following his father, Morris, who was in junk in 1906, entered the scrap iron trade in 1926. Jerry came in 1929. Bill eame later. They wrecked some "chicken coops" in the Bronx and won their first important contract a $60,000 job in 1931 to make room for two Eighth Ave. subway in Queens; Later they took part in razing the old Criminal Courts Building, the Tombs and the Bridge of Sighs.

They took down the Ritz-Carlton, tne Plant mansion and the old Roseland, and were the first contractors signed to raze apartments on the Lincoln Square site. Abe Gach of Lehigh Salvage whose father, Meyer, was a horse-and-wagon junk dealer a3 far back as 1905, says wrecking is good and will be better. His partners, Leo Gach, a cousin, and Charles Edelstein. 1 in the junk business. 1 hey re razing the Arthur Curtiss James Mansion at Park' Ave.

nH fiQth Kt snH urn nnm smashing down the block from Sixteen skyscrapers are scheduled for completion this They will raise to 110 the number of major new buildings that have joined the Manhattan skyline since 1947. Last year more new office space had been built in Manhattan since 1947 than all the office space existing in The din of the pneumatic drill, the crunch of the crowbar, the roar of falling bricks are heard nearly everywhere a passersby wonder about the X-marks on windows of moribund buildingrs. (The wreckers aren't playing tick-tack toe: they're indicating that the rooms behind are empty.) At a few choice sites sidewalk superintendents pape in admiration as crane onerators aim the spectacular swinging iron ball with all the aplomb of expert anglers, 26 FLOORS COME TUMBLING DOWN Few realize that' history is being made. Recently the tallest building ever scheduled for destruction in New York and in the world was knocked over by triumphant steel-hatted wreckers. It was the 26-floor St.

Paul Building on Broadway between Ann and Fulton next door to Hetty Green's old Park Central Bank, which also gave up the ghost. The St. Paul, six floors higher than the Flatiron, topped th skyline when it was finished in 1006. In the forefront of the great emasheroo, serving as building undertakers, are the city's fabulous junkmen. Formerly ener-fwtia scrap iron dealers who ttrxftX to wrecking by the sivage possibilities, they are rather proud of their humble beginnings.

They are men like the Drach- utn 10 4ist on tne east side ot Third Ave, near The News Building. i.