End of a Dynasty - The Times Picayune Building Demolition

Ode to a dear friend that was an investigative reporter for the Times Picayune for over 20 years before it was closed down. Article: The ultimate deadline for 3800 Howard Avenue has arrived. After months of delay, the long process of demolishing the former home of The Times-Picayune to make way for a new, golf-themed entertainment complex commenced this week. Portions of the parking lots have been broken up by an excavator. Workers with Durr Heavy Construction, the general contractor for the demolition, are also installing a perimeter fence to deter the vagrants, vandals, copper thieves and graffiti artists who have haunted the property as it stood empty and idle. After the surface concrete is removed, crews will start tearing down the buildings. Heavy-duty excavators will eat away at the old newsroom, executive suites, printing facility and loading docks that generated much of New Orleans’ news for decades. The Picayune’s iconic clock tower will likely be one of the last elements to fall. Eventually, the entire complex alongside the Pontchartrain Expressway will be reduced to a massive debris pile and trucked away to landfills. The demolition and site clean-up likely won’t be finished until September, said Peter Aamodt, a developer with MCC Real Estate, one of the property’s owners. The old gray lady of the New Orleans newspaper industry opened in 1968. Thousands upon thousands of stories were written within its walls, configured on the pages of newspapers printed on the site, then distributed across the metro area. In 2012, staffers started leaving the building as The Times-Picayune downsized, reduced its home delivery to three days a week and eventually moved its printing operation to Mobile, Alabama. By January 2016, the Howard Avenue facility was abandoned. That September, 3800 Howard Investors LLC, a group that included Joe Jaeger’s MCC Real Estate, Arnold Kirschman, Michael White and Mardi Gras World impresario Barry Kern, bought the property for $3.5 million. They initially sought a tenant to use the existing building. But the mix of a multi-story office building and an industrial site designed for a major newspaper operation proved to be “functionally obsolete,” Aamodt said. They eventually signed a long-term ground lease with Drive Shack. Drive Shack opened its first multi-million-dollar, high-tech golf venue in Orlando, Florida, and has several other facilities around the country in various stages of development. The New Orleans venue will have 90 driving range bays, plus restaurants, meeting rooms, and other amenities. “We’re all very excited that the project has broken ground,” Barry Kern said Wednesday. “We think it’s another new attraction for the city, something locals, tourists and families can do.” They had hoped to start demolition in 2018; the changeover in New Orleans mayoral administrations contributed to the delay. Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s team has been “fantastic” to work with, Aamodt said. “They helped get this off the ground.” After the site is cleared – everything except some underground pilings will go – Drive Shack will finance and build the new facility. MCC Real Estate will function as the landlord for the local investment group. Drive Shack's target opening date is late 2020. The site in recent months became a poster child for urban decay. Many of the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the third-floor executive suites and the old Living and Lagniappe sections have been shattered. One Durr employee theorized that copper thieves broke the windows to toss purloined pipes to the ground, rather than cart them down two tall flights of deadened escalators. Police helped clear and secure the building before Durr started work on Monday. The building’s most valuable feature, the bas-relief plaster mural created by renowned Mexican-born New Orleans artist Enrique Alferez, was painstakingly removed last summer at a cost of $200,000. The 150 individual panels of “Symbols of Communication,” each weighing up to 200 pounds, depicted various forms of written communication. Architect Edward Silverstein commissioned the piece from Alferez in the late 1960s to dress up the Picayune’s soaring three-story lobby. The “Symbols of Communication” panels are now in storage. Their ultimate destination remains unknown, but the goal, Aarmodt said, is for them to eventually be displayed again in New Orleans. However, given the size of the complete artwork, it may be broken up into smaller displays. Meanwhile, the building’s gray-brick exterior became an art gallery of a different sort – an enormous graffiti canvas. Kern was impressed by the artistic quality of some of the graffiti, which will soon crumble with the bricks it adorns. “Some of that stuff is really good,” Kern said. “I’d love to use some of those guys as float artists and sign painters.”