A LONG GOODBYE
Removal of old city hall slowly moving along
Royal Oak’s former city hall building is coming down slowly as workers dismantle the old three-story structure.
Most of the windows have been taken out this week, giving the mid-century building a haunted and abandoned look.
The site is fenced off, and nearly everything of value inside was removed when city workers moved to the new City Hall on Troy Street back in September.
“The work has been going on continually,” said City Manager Paul Brake. “Some asbestos had to be removed, but it was encapsulated and not anything that would have put employees or visitors in danger when the building was operating.”
Asbestos removal is expected to finish up Friday.
Workers will then move on to removing materials from inside the former police station that faces Third Street.
“They will start the demolition process in about three weeks,” Brake said.
But there will be no big implosion to demolish the old city hall in a single stroke. Razing the building and the old police station will happen slowly over a course of
about five weeks.
City officials expect the two buildings to be leveled late in June.
A 2.2-acre city park called Centennial Commons is scheduled to be built on the land after the two empty buildings are demolished as the final piece of Royal Oak’s $60 million Civic Center project that started several years ago.
“When those two building
come down it will really open up the view and we’ll start making visible headway” on the park,” Brake said.
One reason for the slower pace of the demolition of the former city hall is that many of its materials will be recycled.
“Materials are being disassembled, melted down and will be reused,” Brake said. “The bricks will be pulverized and made into new bricks.”
The city will hang on to some of the old bricks for mementos, he added.
A roughly 5-by-14 foot frieze over the entrance of the old city hall was removed in three panels April 2, said Judy Davids, the city’s communications specialist.
The concrete frieze depicts an oak tree above the words “City of Royal Oak.”
“Right now the frieze is stored at the Department of Public Works,” Davids said. “I don’t think anyone has figured out where it should go yet.”
Last year, volunteers from the Royal Oak Historical Society Museum
searched through the building, salvaging what they could.
They carted away a brass fire-hose nozzle, some decades-old furniture, a plaque from when the building was completed, and a few boxes of old city assessor papers, with pictures, of houses and buildings in the city.
Completed in 1952 while the atomic age and midcentury suburbanization boomed, any memories in the old city building will be gone when demolition is completed.