Final update on the Anderson House

See the posts here and here for the first 2 parts of this story.

I was out of town for the weekend. I came back yesterday to find that the demolition of the Anderson House had begun. They were removing the windows and other asbestos containing materials from the house. The windows were wrapped in heavy gray plastic and thrown unceremoniously into a dumpster on the site. Most of the glass shattered from them being thrown. Even so, I had to restrain myself from raiding the dumpster last night. Everyone knows how badly I wanted the windows, the asbestos cops would have been at my house in no time.


I went by there today to see about getting some other things from the house, turns out they were about to start the actual demolition of the house right when I arrived.

It took just over 2 minutes to tear all the additions down.

Then he started in on the main part of the house:




All in all the entire demolition took about 15 minutes... the house stood for 101 years.

I went back this evening to salvage some bricks. I found 3 columns that were salvageable and a door. It's the white one pictured above with half the house torn down. It has an Eastlake rosette and keyhole cover.




That's close to 400 bricks in the picture above. There are still thousands left but unfortunately it got dark on me. Most everything will be gone by the time I get off work today. What really sucks is that this whole time, for the last 4 months, I could have been salvaging all of the other things in the house.I just didn't realize, I thought I had to have something concrete, in writing. Now I see that as long as it wasn't asbestos, it didn't matter.

I learned a pretty hard lesson today, in situations like this it's better to just take then try and ask for something. Every single person I talked to in my long fight for the windows didn't care if I took them, they just didn't want to be responsible. So they passed the buck on to someone else. I spoke with everyone from bank presidents to attorneys, architects to contractors. Everyone passed the buck. If I would have just taken them months ago no one would have missed them, no one would have cared. Now another piece of history is gone.