Company that demolished the House that Ruth Built falls into bankruptcy.
The company that helped tear down the old Yankee Stadium—the tubular concrete venue in the South Bronx has itself been crushed by the prolonged economic downturn, prompting it to file for bankruptcy.
Demco Inc. based outside Buffalo said that it has had trouble finding work to keep busy after finishing the $20 million demolition job on the former Yankee Stadium, which hosted more than 6,000 baseball games in its 85-year history.
Demco workers stripped out the old stadium’s 57,000 seats and extracted memorabilia before executing more than 30 so-called cut-and-pulls, a maneuver that divided the upper and lower decks into chunks of up to 500 tons that workers then pulled down to the ground, according to the company’s website. It was a dangerous task, with some of segments located “just feet from the MTA elevated subway structure,” the website said.
Perhaps the dismantling didn’t settle well with baseball legend Babe Ruth, who died in 1948 at age 53 of pneumonia but who left behind an 86-year spell on the Boston Red Sox, who were only able to break their World Series losing streak in 2004…or it could just be that cautious companies and governments are pushing demolition projects further down their “to do” list.
“In times of recession like those in recent years, potential customers who either may not have an immediate need for demolition services or who may not currently have access to the capital necessary to fund both such demolition and new construction projects, may choose to defer incurring the expense of demolition work,” said Daniel F. Brown, the company’s bankruptcy attorney, in court papers.
The 92-worker company, whose ranks have ballooned to nearly 300 employees during busier times, is down to only eight projects, according to court papers.
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