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An Orchard Park demolition firm has been awarded the contract to clear a site on Buffalo's Niagara Square for a new federal courthouse.
Seebald & Associates negotiated a successful bid of $1.5 million to tear down the former Lawley Services building, at 120 Delaware Ave., and three other structures at the northwest corner of Delaware Avenue and Niagara Square. The company will begin work this month.
The General Services Administration described the local company as a "veteran-owned" business. The company could not be reached to comment on being awarded a key contract in the high-profile project.
If the project is included in the 2007 federal budget, construction will get under way next summer.
Selection of a demolition contractor, like many phases of the long-delayed courthouse project, has not been a quick process. The GSA originally was slated to begin taking bids in December 2005, with razing and site remediation to begin in early 2006.
Problems in the selection process, combined with uncertainty about funding for courthouse construction, delayed the contract award for nine months.
U.S. District Judge William M. Skretny said the impending start of demolition is a "major milestone" in the courthouse saga.
"Once the site is cleared, we're in position for an immediate start-up of construction. Having no hurdles will help us remain the No. 1 project on the national courthouse list," Skretny said.
First proposed in 2002, the project has been put on hold three times because of federal budget constraints. Current indications are that Congress will give final approval now that it is back from its summer recess. The project, whose price tag has ballooned from an original $100 million to more than $137 million, also must gain White House support to become a reality in the 2007 federal budget.
The 90,000-square-foot Lawley Services Building, which includes the former Erlanger Theater complex, is the largest building on the site. Also slated for demolition is the circa 1852 Chandler/Balcom House, a longtime restaurant site at 89 Niagara St.
A former restaurant at 93 Niagara St. and a one-story office building at 101 Niagara also will be razed to make way for the 10-story courthouse.
Does anybody know if the Balcom/Chandler house is going to be demo'ed as part of this job. It is a historic house and the GSA has been trying to find someone to move it out of the way of the courthouse. These things usually don't work out, though, for obvious reasons.
THREATENED WITH DEMOLITION
Balcom/Chandler House
89 Niagara Street, Buffalo, NY
by Tim Tielman, Executive Director of the Campaign for Buffalo
History, Architecture and Culture
The Balcom/Chandler house at 89 Niagara Street is significant as the residential structure in the neighborhood of Niagara Square.
Philo Balcom, a brick manufacturer with works at Main and Ferry near a notable clay deposit, purchased the lot from the adjacent Niagara Square Baptist Church and erected a house in the fashionable Italian Villa style. The house was constructed c.1852 of bricks made by Balcom himself.
Balcom sold the house in 1855 to Fidelia and Alden Barker, a land and insurance agent for $4,500.
Balcom Street, running from the Linwood Historic District to near the Hamlin Park Historic District is named for Balcom and near the clay deposit he exploited.
The Barkers owned the house for about a decade, selling it to Henry Chandler in 1864.
Chandler owned the house for the next two decades and probably added the mansard roof and bay window to the tower in the late 1860s or early 1870s.
Chandler (1830 -1896), was a master engraver and the developer of the wax process of engraving. He parlayed that invention into the firm Jewett and Chandler. Jewett and Chandler at one time had the contract to do the illustrations for the U.S. Patent office. After Jewett & Chandler was dissolved in the late 1870s, Chandler moved on to Matthews and Northrup, a major northeastern printer of maps, atlases and colored panoramas headquartered in Buffalo.
In the 1880s a reversal of fortune in the 1880s forced Chandler to sell 89 Niagara Street.
Chandler Street in North Buffalo, notable for its late 19th and early 20th century industrial architecture, is named for him.
Demolition contractor selected for courthouse
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