Note: Reporter Jodie Mozdzer is filing vignettes about the demolition of a few buildings at the Riverside Apartments on Olson Drive.
Denise Boyd cringed each time the metal claw chomped down on a piece of her old living room.
Boyd, 16, had a hard time watching the demolition of Building 1 at the Riverside Apartments Wednesday. For eight years of her youth, she lived on the third floor of the building. Her old apartment was the first one exposed Tuesday, when an excavator began ripping down bricks and concrete.
“Oh my God!” Boyd squealed as the floor to her old living room dropped two stories to the ground.
She had been standing there for about an hour, watching the scene with her friend Raven Daniels. Soon the claw would tear apart her brother’s old room. Then her mothers and then hers. She planned to watch until it got to her bedroom. 
“It’s sad,” Boyd said. “I’ve been crying all day.”
Boyd’s family secured a brick from the demolition for a memento. They still live at Riverside, just across the complex now. Their apartment is on the first floor, Boyd said, which is less desirable than a third-floor.
“It was calm,” in the old apartment, Boyd said. “There were lots of stairs so nobody wanted to come to my house.”
Wednesday’s demolition drew a different crowd than Tuesday’s.
A line of cars parked across the street on Olson Drive, driver side windows rolled down, eyes staring out.
Some were construction workers, like John Picard of Seymour and Mike Marino of Ansonia.
“I like watching the equipment,” Marino said. “When this building was built, they used concrete floors. Now they usually have wood floors.”
It makes a difference in the time it takes to tear the building down, Marino said.
“They’ve got to pick through, get all the steel out, shake off the concrete,” he said.
The steel can be scrapped. So can the copper pipes being pulled out of the rubble. Those were neatly piled in the back of one of the workers’ trucks Wednesday afternoon.
“This has been a long time coming,” Marino said, noting that to really solve the problems in the neighborhood, “you’ve gotta knock it all down.”
