Rubble Excerpt: Erase-atecture
“You hate to wake up to the sound of chainsaws or bulldozers,” one Los Angeles resident groused not long ago about his losing battle with the newfangled “erase-atecture.” Tough luck, buddy. Like it or not, the buzz and rumble of house-hungry machinery has become a permanent fixture of the American landscape. In 2001, the city of sunshine and noir doled out 1,211 demolition permits for destruction as diverse as the Gilmore Bank (a ’50s relic ditched to build a shiny happy shopping mall) and the “Pink Palace” of Holmby Hills (former lair of Jayne Mansfield), prompting the Los Angeles Times to tut-tut: “Snakes shed scales. Roses drop petals. And Los Angeles levels buildings—about three per day.”
Indeed, what the paper called a “new sort of ghost town” of now-spectral structures is growing more jam-packed by the minute, with the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods doing most of the damage as they make way for McMansions. “We just smash it up and separate what we can,” one Canoga Park contractor shrugged when asked about the down-and-dirty particulars. A savvy L.A. salvage firm, on the other hand, was having a field day amid the ruins, doing such booming business that they’d managed to amass one hefty pile of porcelain. “We probably have about 300 toilets,” said Jerry Hernandez of Santa Fe Wrecking. “We go as far back as about the 1890s.”
The nutty story in La-La land is only symptomatic of a demolition derby stretching from one up-market end of the nation to the other. “A disturbing pattern of demolitions is approaching epidemic proportions in historic neighborhoods across America,” complained the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2002. Behold the teardown, or the junking of an existing house in order to build a vastly larger one on the same site. From Boston to Beverly Hills, the quaintest bungalows, Cape Cods, Colonials, and ranchers are getting munched away in tactical real-estate maneuvers known as “Bash-and-Builds” and “Scrape-Offs,” clearing the plot for gentry-friendly “Starter Castles” and perilous “Snout Houses”—the latter so called for their forward-thrusting garages, which are deemed so gangrenous they’re banned from older neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon.
Blame it all on soaring real estate prices and the supersizing of the American house (the average newly built home has 2,305 square feet, up 53 percent from 1970, despite the shrinking of the average American family by 15 percent over that period), a formidable double-whammy whose side effect happens to be massive profit margins for brazen speculative developers. “A house is most likely a goner,” the experts confirmed, “if the property it’s on is worth far more than the structure.” The mechanics of the teardown are bracingly simple. You plunk down $400,000 for a lousy, 1,500-square-foot house on a prize lot. Then, it’s just $3,500 for a quick bulldozer blitz, and a day or two later, voilà—tabula rasa is all yours. There isn’t even any shame in it these days. “Builders used to be afraid to be the first person in a neighborhood to tear a house down,” a New Jersey developer cheerfully explained. “But now they’re looking around and saying they don’t mind taking the risk.” No, siree. Formerly quiet, leafy neighborhoods everywhere are now gripped in mano-a-bulldozer combat as neighbors battle developers, preservationists report: “Teardowns, in short, have reached crisis proportions.”
In places like Stamford, Connecticut, it’s creative destruction at its finest, and don’t go running next door when the wrecking crew rumbles down the street—“For the most part, people are pretty apathetic about these things,” said the head of the Stamford zoning board—while demolition dust is knee-deep in Illinois, where Chicago’s Hinsdale suburb has seen more than 1,200 homes razed in the past two decades—a boggling 20 percent of its housing stock. But nothing quite touches Bergen County, New Jersey, where the number of demolitions jumped 82 percent between 1995 and 1999, plowing under everything from $200,000 rag-tag bungalows to $800,000 turn-of-the-last-century Victorians. “The logo of this town shouldn’t be a monument to the Revolutionary War,” growled a disgruntled councilman in historic Fort Lee. “It should be a bulldozer.”
Don’t blame the bulldozers, of course, which just follow the builders, who supposedly follow the “Rule of Three,” which says that wrecking a structure will be profitable if new construction on the plot will fetch three times what the developer paid for it. And when the councilmen grumble, there’s always the next hamlet over: “Developers are like ants. If you put the cover on the Bundt cake on the picnic table, they’ll just move to the potato salad,” said one Chicago architect, a developer himself.
Fully a third of all home sales in some areas are now made to buyers like Larry Bruno, a 32-year-old mortgage banker who had just snapped up a four-bedroom 1970 colonial on western Long Island for $1.175 million—only to replace it with a six-bedroom “modern colonial” replete with pool and basketball court. “Our realtor said that in Woodbury and Syosset there was no land left to buy, that we’d have to tear a house down,” he calmly told a reporter in 2004. “I said ‘Fine, find me something old to demolish and we’ll build our dream house.’” That was music to the ears of the bullish Long Island Builders Institute, which was actively promoting the joys of sacking a house for a mere $20,000 and indulging one’s taste for luxury living. It’s all bang-up business if you’re in the wrecking game, of course, but there are a lot of sensitive types who happen to drive bulldozers. Over in the Hamptons, George Mathys, owner of George’s Roll Off and Demolition Service on Long Island, wrecked 18 large homes one year. “Probably 50 percent of them were totally livable,” he marveled. “It makes me sad because I would love to live in a lot of them myself.”
Indeed, what the paper called a “new sort of ghost town” of now-spectral structures is growing more jam-packed by the minute, with the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods doing most of the damage as they make way for McMansions. “We just smash it up and separate what we can,” one Canoga Park contractor shrugged when asked about the down-and-dirty particulars. A savvy L.A. salvage firm, on the other hand, was having a field day amid the ruins, doing such booming business that they’d managed to amass one hefty pile of porcelain. “We probably have about 300 toilets,” said Jerry Hernandez of Santa Fe Wrecking. “We go as far back as about the 1890s.”
The nutty story in La-La land is only symptomatic of a demolition derby stretching from one up-market end of the nation to the other. “A disturbing pattern of demolitions is approaching epidemic proportions in historic neighborhoods across America,” complained the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2002. Behold the teardown, or the junking of an existing house in order to build a vastly larger one on the same site. From Boston to Beverly Hills, the quaintest bungalows, Cape Cods, Colonials, and ranchers are getting munched away in tactical real-estate maneuvers known as “Bash-and-Builds” and “Scrape-Offs,” clearing the plot for gentry-friendly “Starter Castles” and perilous “Snout Houses”—the latter so called for their forward-thrusting garages, which are deemed so gangrenous they’re banned from older neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon.
Blame it all on soaring real estate prices and the supersizing of the American house (the average newly built home has 2,305 square feet, up 53 percent from 1970, despite the shrinking of the average American family by 15 percent over that period), a formidable double-whammy whose side effect happens to be massive profit margins for brazen speculative developers. “A house is most likely a goner,” the experts confirmed, “if the property it’s on is worth far more than the structure.” The mechanics of the teardown are bracingly simple. You plunk down $400,000 for a lousy, 1,500-square-foot house on a prize lot. Then, it’s just $3,500 for a quick bulldozer blitz, and a day or two later, voilà—tabula rasa is all yours. There isn’t even any shame in it these days. “Builders used to be afraid to be the first person in a neighborhood to tear a house down,” a New Jersey developer cheerfully explained. “But now they’re looking around and saying they don’t mind taking the risk.” No, siree. Formerly quiet, leafy neighborhoods everywhere are now gripped in mano-a-bulldozer combat as neighbors battle developers, preservationists report: “Teardowns, in short, have reached crisis proportions.”
In places like Stamford, Connecticut, it’s creative destruction at its finest, and don’t go running next door when the wrecking crew rumbles down the street—“For the most part, people are pretty apathetic about these things,” said the head of the Stamford zoning board—while demolition dust is knee-deep in Illinois, where Chicago’s Hinsdale suburb has seen more than 1,200 homes razed in the past two decades—a boggling 20 percent of its housing stock. But nothing quite touches Bergen County, New Jersey, where the number of demolitions jumped 82 percent between 1995 and 1999, plowing under everything from $200,000 rag-tag bungalows to $800,000 turn-of-the-last-century Victorians. “The logo of this town shouldn’t be a monument to the Revolutionary War,” growled a disgruntled councilman in historic Fort Lee. “It should be a bulldozer.”
Don’t blame the bulldozers, of course, which just follow the builders, who supposedly follow the “Rule of Three,” which says that wrecking a structure will be profitable if new construction on the plot will fetch three times what the developer paid for it. And when the councilmen grumble, there’s always the next hamlet over: “Developers are like ants. If you put the cover on the Bundt cake on the picnic table, they’ll just move to the potato salad,” said one Chicago architect, a developer himself.
Fully a third of all home sales in some areas are now made to buyers like Larry Bruno, a 32-year-old mortgage banker who had just snapped up a four-bedroom 1970 colonial on western Long Island for $1.175 million—only to replace it with a six-bedroom “modern colonial” replete with pool and basketball court. “Our realtor said that in Woodbury and Syosset there was no land left to buy, that we’d have to tear a house down,” he calmly told a reporter in 2004. “I said ‘Fine, find me something old to demolish and we’ll build our dream house.’” That was music to the ears of the bullish Long Island Builders Institute, which was actively promoting the joys of sacking a house for a mere $20,000 and indulging one’s taste for luxury living. It’s all bang-up business if you’re in the wrecking game, of course, but there are a lot of sensitive types who happen to drive bulldozers. Over in the Hamptons, George Mathys, owner of George’s Roll Off and Demolition Service on Long Island, wrecked 18 large homes one year. “Probably 50 percent of them were totally livable,” he marveled. “It makes me sad because I would love to live in a lot of them myself.”
