DETROIT – Officials with the city of Detroit have ordered an emergency demolition for a partially collapsed building in Eastern Market.
The partial collapse happened just before noon, Saturday, Sept. 16. One person was injured and several businesses are now permanently closed.
The city said the building is unsafe. Business owners haven’t been allowed inside to collect their things.
Some people said the city needs to slow down and not be so quick to demolish an irreplaceable piece of Detroit’s history.
The Del Bene Building on Russell Street is 130 years old. Fans of Detroit architecture want the city to explore saving the building, not just to preserve history, but because they believe it’s salvageable. City officials want the building to come down as quickly as possible, even though the cause of the collapse is still unknown.
The Detroit Buildings, Safety, Engineering, and Environmental Department said the building “poses a direct life safety threat to the public.”
No one is allowed in, not even engineers or business owners.
Architects and building preservationists quickly wrote to the city about the planned demolition.
The Michigan Historic Preservation Network told the city the building “has a reinforced concrete frame,” and said it appears, “there is no threat of the imminent collapse of the entire building.”
An Architect and member of Preservation Detroit wrote that based on photographs, the damage is “clearly just a localized failure of the exterior non-load-bearing facade.” He went on to point out “There appeared to be active construction going on inside the building recently,” and asked, “Was construction happening on Saturday during the failure?”
Calls to the building’s owner were not returned.
The Del Bene Building had received nine blight tickets, most recently in 2017, but until the partial collapse, the building was home to several businesses in the Historic Eastern Market Area.
According to preservationists, the Del Bene Building was originally a tobacco warehouse and they believe the building is still solid because they don’t build them like they used to.
A date for the planned demolition has not yet been set. The cause of the building collapse is still unknown.