Note: Reporter Jodie Mozdzer is filing occasional vignettes from the demolition of buildings at the Riverside Apartments on Olson Drive.
As the rubble from Building 1 gets sorted through, crews set to work Wednesday taking down the second of two buildings approved for demolition at the Riverside Apartments.
Building 2 will likely be torn down by the end of the day, said Gino Capozziello, an operator for his family’s wrecking company Industrial Wrecking of Bridgeport.
Wednesday crews sorted out steel from plastic debris, and piled concrete to prepare it for crushing. Capozziello said the foundations will be taken out, crushed and then used as fill to level out the land. The sorting and clearing of debris will take about two more weeks, he said.
“It depends on how fast they get everything separated,” Capozziello said.
As the walls of Building 1 slowly disappeared over the past two weeks, so did the crowds that watched the first couple days of demolition. Wednesday morning, only one person was watching as Building 2 started to come down.
John Sanders quietly watched the excavator tear apart chucks of his father’s old apartment building. He says he has lots of memories from spending time with his father in the building, but he’s indifferent about it coming down.
“Eventually they’ll tear those down too,” Sanders said about the rest of the Riverside apartments, where his father now lives.
“I think he’ll eventually end up back over here,” Sanders said, referring to the housing authority’s plans to eventually tear down all the brick buildings and put up townhouse apartments.
