Interior demolition starting on Masonic Temple

<b>Photo by Brian McDonald</b><br>The view from a Masonic Temple window offers picturesque scene of the State House. Demolition work is well underway inside the concrete walls of the structure. This spring, Sage Hospitality Resources will begin rebuilding what will become a 272-room Marriott Renaissance Hotel.
Photo by Brian McDonald
The view from a Masonic Temple window offers picturesque scene of the State House. Demolition work is well underway inside the concrete walls of the structure. This spring, Sage Hospitality Resources will begin rebuilding what will become a 272-room Marriott Renaissance Hotel.

The steel bracing system surrounding the Masonic Temple downtown has been completed to support the 2-foot-thick outer limestone wall, while workers begin demolishing the interior of the building from the top down. Sage Hospitality Resources, the Denver-based developer, plans to start rebuilding the interior this summer.

“Demolition has started, we’ve finished the façade bracing, and we’re pulling a lot of steel girder off the roof,” said Michael C. Coolidge, senior vice president of development for Sage. “We’re going to drop down through the building, ripping out floor plates and steel, and that will take two months.”

Demolition will begin with taking down what remains of the temple roof, and workers from Massachusetts-based S.O.S. Demolition will go down floor by floor with the help of robotic equipment.

“It’s treacherous work. They’re working on floors that have been exposed to the elements for 70 years,”

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Coolidge said. “They’re dropping stuff down through the building, so the fewer people the better. People will still have to operate the machines, but now instead of having 20 guys on a floor using jackhammers, you have one of these machines.”

Once interior demolition is complete, Sage will shore up parts of the foundation and pour additional concrete in three below-grade levels, which will eventually be meeting rooms.

“Below ground there are no existing floor plates, just some small spaces, so we’re opening it up and pulling all of that dirt out,” Coolidge said. This work is slated to begin in late spring. From the first floor up, steel will be used, and installation is scheduled for summer into fall. The concrete wall structures, which will be tied back to the façade, will be constructed in January and February of 2006, he said, followed by drywall, plumbing and electrical work.

This summer, almost as a second project, Sage will also be working on the ballroom and underground spaces at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium next door, which will be connected to the hotel, when the theater closes its doors for the season.

One of the vital elements in making the project feasible are the state and federal historic tax credits Sage has qualified for, which will provide credits for a total of 50 percent of the eligible costs for the project: 30 percent from the state, and 20 percent federal. But even with the credits, converting the temple into a hotel won’t be easy.

The temple presents a number of physical restrictions that Sage had to work around in order to make the $62 million hotel feasible. The rooms will be narrower and longer than normal: 11.5 feet wide by 36 feet long.

There are 350 to 400 existing window openings that dictated the placement of the rooms; some rooms will have one window; corner rooms will have two.

“Nothing ever goes according to plan; that’s what makes it so exciting,” Coolidge said. “The steel bracing system is very complicated and it was quite an engineering feat. It’s a very important piece of the puzzle and it took a little longer than expected.”

It took crews more than four months to erect the steel supports, which were anchored to the ground by concrete pillars poured into the ground. And while all the interior work will remain unseen by the public, the steel outer supports will be on the building holding up the façade until February 2006, Coolidge said.

“The biggest activity that will be visible will be the exterior repair in spring 2006 and putting on the roof and the penthouse area,” he said.

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