Only the second half of the name, The Guaranty Trust and Savings Bank, remains on one of Jacksonville’s most prominent Downtown buildings. The other half disappears at a gaping opening, where the southwest corner has been removed.
The demolition is making way for a renovation of the historic Bostwick Building. It hasn’t been so much a demolition, though, as a painstaking disassembly.
Workers chiseled the gray-pressed bricks from the building’s face one by one, stacked them in alternating directions atop wood pallets and then shrink-wrapped each bundle.
Decorative limestone blocks were letter-, number- and color-coded, so they could be placed like puzzle pieces in exactly the same spots from which they’d been removed.
“They’re taking it down brick-by-brick and then rebuilding it,” one observer said.
Not quite, but almost.
One of the strangest things about the restoration is, once completed, very little of the building will remain except the exterior skin.
Structurally there wasn’t much left to salvage. Had it been let go much longer, there wouldn’t have been a building to save.
The roof and floors had deteriorated. The foundation had failed in one corner. The walls will remain, but they will no longer be part of the building’s support system. Instead, a new steel-framed building will be erected inside and the outside walls bolted to it.
The Bostwick is the historic Downtown building Jacksonville wouldn’t let go of.
Erected in 1902, it was one of the first banks to rebuild after the Great Fire leveled much of Downtown.
For several decades, it was owned by the Bostwick family, whose tenants included famed architect Henry Klutho.
In 2012, Jacksonville designated it a historic landmark to block the Bostwick family’s attempt to demolish the long-vacant structure.
By then, the building was in poor shape. Fines for code violations piled up until finally, the building was foreclosed upon by the city and sold at auction to Jacques Klempf, owner of Dixie Egg Co. and co-owner of three restaurants in Jacksonville.
He plans to open the Cowford Chophouse, a high-end steak and seafood restaurant. It will be run through Forking Amazing Restaurants, an umbrella company that oversees marketing and operations for all four restaurants owned by Klempf and his business partners.
Born and raised in Jacksonville, Klempf said saving the building at Bay and Ocean streets “just seemed like the right thing to do.”
Plotting strategy in the war room
Every Friday morning, key players from the reconstruction team meet in an adjacent building where they plot strategy for dealing with the challenges that are uncovered. Klempf calls it the war room.
It’s been three years since Klempf first committed to the project, and the work has been complicated and tedious. But on a Friday in early November, he was feeling good.
“We go in that building and look at it and we almost get choked up,” he said. “It was literally just on toothpicks, ready to crumble. And we’re turning it into something that will be sound and will be here for a long time.”
The project’s general contractor is Elkins Construction. The company mainly tackles new commercial projects — offices, warehouses, schools and churches, but Mike Stauffer, the Chophouse project superintendent, specializes in renovations. He does it because he likes the challenge of solving problems.
At two other Downtown renovations, Stauffer coordinated construction on buildings while they were still occupied by tenants.
At the Wells Fargo building, visited by 2,000 people per day, workers were “taking out windows at the same merchants were selling food.” At a year-long renovation of First Coast News television studios, Stauffer kept welders moving forward while broadcasts aired around the clock.
The challenge for the Bostwick would be to deal with the building’s fragile condition. To figure out how to keep the men safe and to make sure a ceiling or wall didn’t collapse during demolition.
The Bostwick had been a victim of outdated construction, poor fortune and neglect.
The structure pre-dates reinforced concrete — a building technique that embeds steel in concrete to absorb twisting and stretching.
Instead, the Bostwick’s strength comes from its brick and mortar.
It’s a method that works well as long as the building only has to worry about gravity. Not so well if the building settles.
An underground utility vault installed at the southeast corner had allowed sand to wash away near the footer. The foundation sank three inches. Stress cracks rippled through the walls.
At the same time on the west side, a leaking roof had been eating away at the building’s wood-frame interior.
The crumbling roof at one end had been advancing toward the failed foundation at the other. Had the two problems met, the walls would have collapsed. The only thing holding up the southeast corner was that the remaining roof and second floor were still tied to it.
Lately, the clock on that outcome had been speeding up. Every afternoon, the Elkins crew swept up after work. Every morning when they came back, there would be new debris on the floor.
“I’d say by next year we probably wouldn’t have been able to do what we’re doing,” said Tom Hanley, Elkins project director.
Methodical approach to taking building apart
Elkins wanted to construct a new building inside the Bostwick’s historic four walls.
It was a chicken-and-egg situation. The interior they’d have to demolish held the building together.
Workers alternated between performing demolition and installing pipe bracing against the walls, both inside and out.
It wouldn’t be a normal demolition, either. The floors and the roof were so deteriorated nobody could stand on them. The men worked from lifts.
Progressing in 10-foot increments, they’d cut out a floor joist and drop it to the ground. Cut out the ceiling and drop it, and then cut out the roof.
Then, they’d stop. Wait for other workers to brace the exposed wall. And go on to the next 10 feet.
“It was a very methodical way of taking a building apart,” Stauffer said. “But it was the only way we could actually do it.”
The demolition left a structure that was only four walls and sky. Then, even some of the walls started coming down.
One reason Elkins removed the southeast corner was to replace, rather than repair, the failed foundation beneath it. Where old footers remain elsewhere, they’ll be tied to a new foundation that spans the perimeter and is supported by steel piles driven down to bedrock.
The corner opening will also allow entry for some large equipment needed to demolish the old bank’s concrete vaults.
Then, construction will shift, from demolition and preservation to building anew.
A grant application filed with the city by Klempf estimates the project’s cost at $6 million. Because of the unknowns, that price could go higher.
Whether the cost is worth it will depend on how the building is used, say other contractors who’ve done historic renovations. When a building is repurposed as a business, an owner weighs the return that business will deliver.
But another reason to save a building is for historic preservation. Even buildings that don’t yield a return are sometimes saved as museums.
“They tell us a lot about where society was at that particular time and why that architecture was important,” said R.G. White, a contractor who has restored historic farmhouses and barns.
The Bostwick Building’s arched windows, for example, come from a time when there were no fluorescent bulbs or LED lights. The building needed its large windows to let in enough light, White said.
For Klempf though, saving the Bostwick is far more than just a business decision. It’s about saving a piece of Jacksonville.
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