Erasing an eyesore

St. Joseph Riverside demolition underway

WARREN -- In the pouring rain Wednesday morning, the old St. Joseph Riverside Hospital on Tod Avenue quietly began to come down, marking the beginning of the end for the complex that has been rotting away for years.

Watching the building come down in the afternoon, Warren Mayor Doug Franklin called it a "great day."

"It's been the No. 1 priority of my administration since I took office, so it's heartwarming to see this, not just because of my own goals, but (because) the community has asked for this for decades," Franklin said.

Crews from Campbell-based ProQuality Demolition used excavators to take the first bites out of a low canopy on the building's east side around 7:30 a.m.

The former hospital is made of 12 interconnecting buildings totaling more than 271,000 square feet with an additional roughly 3,000 feet of utility space, according to Warren Community Development Director Michael Keys.

Over the next three to four months, it all will be demolished, including the basements, and the space will be backfilled with clean dirt. If completed this spring as scheduled, the complex will be leveled exactly 100 years after its first building was constructed in 1923.

The facility was closed around 1995 when HM Health Services began moving its operations to the former Warren General Hospital on the city's east side. Twenty years later, after passing through several owners and falling into disrepair, the city condemned the complex in 2015.

Virtually no one is arguing against the demolition of the longtime eyesore, but for many residents who shared a history with the hospital, its destruction is bittersweet. As word of the demo spread on social media Wednesday, people remarked they were born there, learned medicine there, or had family who once worked there.

While four excavators were moving at the site Wednesday and bricks, trees and light posts were tumbling down, the official start of the demolition of the main building will be next week, marked with a community event that will be formally announced later this week, Franklin said.

"We think they deserve their day to sort of celebrate this huge demolition project -- probably the largest commercial demolition in the city's history," Franklin said.

Cosmo Iamurri, president of ProQuality, said his crew is still finishing the last of the asbestos removal on the west side of the complex. Once demolition is in full swing, some 15 excavators outfitted with an array of attachments will be active at the site. A high reach excavator that can comfortably work about 80 feet in the air will also be used, he said.

"There's certain means and methods to take it down carefully, being that the structure is damaged in a few areas," Iamurri said.

The project, which has been estimated to cost upward of $5 million, is being funded through a $2.5 million Ohio Department of Development grant for asbestos mitigation and some $3.4 million secured by the Trumbull County Land Bank for demolition.

Iamurri said the large project is no trouble for ProQuality, which in the past decade has conducted some 75 school and 10 hospital demolitions.

"This is actually easy for us because it's so wide open, and there's nothing close to it," Iamurri said.

Once the demolition is complete, the city plans to take custody of and repurpose the property with the community's input on what that will look like, officials have said.