Nashville City Paper quotes Bob Brickner in article highlighting demolition of former Nashville Thermal Transfer Corp.'s smokestack

Kaboom: Thermal stack goes
By William Williams
July 23, 2004
Nashville City Paper

Viewed as a quirky icon by some and as a harsh eyesore by others, the towering smokestack that dominates the former Nashville Thermal Transfer Corp. site downtown will be toppled Sunday at 7:45 a.m. The demolition will require no more than 10 pounds of explosives and will result in the 199-foot stack, erected in the mid-1990s, being felled like a chopped tree.

Baltimore-based Controlled Demolition Inc., which imploded downtown’s Andrew Jackson Hotel in 1972, will handle the demolition. Pedestrians can view the event from the Shelby Avenue and Gateway bridges. “This is a fairly small project, but it’s important to Nashville,” said Mark Loizeaux, CDI president. “It’s architecturally interesting.”

That architectural component is why some had hoped to see the stack remain. For example, Streuver Brothers, Eccles & Rouse Inc., which wants to develop two mixed-use buildings on the site, has mentioned including the stack with its proposed project. The Streuver project would accompany a baseball park for the Nashville Sounds.

And some local architects find the stack, which is made primarily of poured reinforced concrete and contains two metal flues, as a potential useful artifact overlooking the Cumberland River.

“Cities are interesting when they are overlaid and overlaid so that there are fragments of past years,” said Seab Tuck of Tuck Hinton Architects. “In a perfect world, it would be saved.” David Bailey, principal at Hastings Architecture Associates, said that though the stack offers no significant architectural details or materials, “it still had the opportunity to be a landmark defining the Demonbruen Street axis.”

The stack is believed to be the city’s tallest of its type, according to Tim Hestle, who was Nashville Thermal Transfer Corp.’s last general manager. Hestle said Thermal capped the stack at 199 feet to avoid a safety lights requirement had the structure soared 200 feet or more.

“We didn’t want that maintenance headache,” said Hestle, who is now plant operations manager with the Metro District Energy System facility that heats and cools various large downtown buildings and that replaced the trash-burning Thermal facility.

Fairfax, Va.-based Gershman, Brickner & Bratton, Inc. (GBB) has consulted the Thermal Transfer Corp. Board of Directors during the demolition of the entire facility and will aid in Sunday’s effort. Bob Brickner, GBB senior vice president and manager of the demolition project, said a wrecking ball razing was considered. “But considering the economics for this project, it will be faster and less expensive to [demolish by explosives],” he said.

During the demolition, the Metro Public Works Department will close portions of First Avenue, Demonbreun Street and Malloy Street for a brief period.

The most recent downtown demolitions of note that involved explosives included the Sam Davis Hotel, the Sudekum Building and the Cain-Sloan Co. Building, all felled between 1983 and 1994.