Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Demolition expert prepares for second Las Vegas implosion in a week

Gramercy

Eli Segall

Workers prepare the Gramercy’s nine-story residential tower Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015, for implosion. The southwest Las Vegas building is scheduled to be toppled at 8 a.m. Sunday.

With a hydraulic excavator nearby, chiseling through the ceiling of an underground parking garage with 10,000 pounds of force and noise, demolition man Ken Mercurio could probably use some rest.

He had barely slept for a few days, staying up for some 40 hours because an implosion didn’t go as planned. When he toppled the Clarion, a 12-story off-Strip hotel, early Tuesday, an elevator tower withstood the blasts. The hotel crumbled faster than expected, and rubble kept much of the elevator shaft in place.

Work crews pulled it down Tuesday afternoon. But instead of heading to his hotel room, Mercurio, who had been up since 4 a.m. Monday, went to work on another real-estate detonation and a first in his career — two implosions in one week.

Gramercy

This partially built, nine-story residential tower at Gramercy, formerly ManhattanWest, on Russell Road near the 215 Beltway in Las Vegas, is being prepared for implosion on Jan. 22, 2015. Demolition is planned for 8 a.m. Feb. 15. Launch slideshow »

He’s overseeing the implosion of a nine-story condo tower at the Gramercy in the southwest valley, a never-completed building and visible reminder of Las Vegas’ boom and bust — that is, until it crumbles about 8 a.m. Sunday into a heap of concrete and steel and is sold for scrap.

Demo crews are wiring the building with copper-clad plastic explosives that will shoot the copper out at 29,000 feet per second, or 19,773 mph, slicing steel beams in a precise, planned way.

After that, the building will experience “catastrophic failure,” then gravity takes over and “down she comes,” said Mercurio, owner of Reno-based Diversified Demolition Co.

If all goes as planned, most of the building will collapse into the tower’s underground parking garage, which extends 60 feet east in front of the building and whose ceiling was being demolished by the excavator on Wednesday.

The Gramercy, a stylish mixed-use property formerly known as ManhattanWest, is on Russell Road at the 215 Beltway. The 20-acre project was mothballed, mid-construction, around 2009 by original developer Alex Edelstein.

He sold it in 2013 for just $20 million, a fraction of the $170 million he reportedly spent before lenders yanked his funding.

The new owners — San Francisco-based Krausz Companies and Las Vegas’ WGH Partners — renamed the project and are completing much of what Edelstein didn’t finish. But they left the tower largely untouched, and last month, decided it had to go.

As they see it, the tower doesn’t fit with the rest of the Gramercy’s low-rise office and residential buildings and would have cost a fortune to get up to code.

That’s where Mercurio steps in.

Martin-Harris Construction, the Gramercy’s general contractor, hired him to demolish the building. When the developers decided to implode it rather than dismantle it, Mercurio brought in Maryland-based Controlled Demolition Inc., or CDI, a real-estate explosives company that’s been detonating casinos and other buildings in Las Vegas for more than 20 years, everything from the Dunes and the Aladdin to the Stardust and the Clarion, which it laced with 1,100 pounds of dynamite.

“We have performed every implosion project there to date,” said Stacey Loizeaux, whose family owns CDI.

To get ready for the Gramercy’s implosion, Mercurio’s crews have been gutting the tower the past few weeks, ripping out walls, doors, insulation, kitchen cabinets, metal framing, windows. After the building comes down, it will be four to six weeks before the site is cleared of debris and the underground garage is demolished and replaced with dirt.

As of Wednesday, the tower was basically stripped bare, down to little more than concrete and steel.

“It looks like something that’s being built rather being demolished,” Mercurio said.

On Sunday morning, workers will temporarily shut down roads, including the Beltway between the Tropicana and Sunset/Durango exits, and make sure no one gets too close to the tower. Experience tells Mercurio that someone will try.

At Clarion, workers delayed the implosion by 40 minutes because an onlooker was on a rooftop next to the site.

"It's really not a good place to be," Mercurio said.

Altogether, it's been a week of firsts for Mercurio. Before the Clarion, he had never imploded a building that didn't all come down in one fell swoop.

"It's never happened to me," he said.

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