Meet John Adamo: Demolition man
Neal Rubin, back in his Free Press days, did a real interesting look at John Adamo. I found it a fascinating look into the man who is so eager to destroy.
TAKING DOWN HUDSON'S WILL BE FRAUGHT WITH COMPLICATIONS AND DANGER - JUST THE JOB JOHN ADAMO JR. WOULD LOVE
By Neal Rubin
Detroit Free Press
March 10, 1997
Someone smashed a bottle of Wild Irish Rose in Christmas Toyland.
The pieces glimmer as John Adamo Jr. plays his flashlight across the 12th
story of J.L. Hudson's showplace. Water has buckled the floor, and the boards
come together in peaks, like a musty meringue. The flashlight catches a chunk
of plaster, and Adamo flips it aside with the toe of his work boot.
Adamo, 39, remembers visiting Santa in this room as a child, riding the
bus downtown with his grandmother to stand in line. He did his Christmas
shopping at Hudson's in 1982, the last December before it closed.
"It was the best, " he says fondly. "This huge building, with aisles and
aisles and floors upon floors of merchandise."
Adamo grew up in St. Clair Shores and lives in Troy. He understands the
importance of the Hudson's building -- the history, the symbolism, the mental
snapshots from a million lives.
He would be honored to knock it down.
Adamo Demolition punched out Dodge Main and Carmel Hall and a good chunk
of the Uniroyal factory. It's working on the crumbling towers of the Jeffries
projects, and it has a revolving contract with the city of Detroit to bulldoze
abandoned houses.
Every job has its challenges and charms, but Hudson's is special. No one
knows who will get the assignment, how long it will take or how much it will
cost, but Adamo is certain of this: "Hudson's is the most difficult job in the
Midwest in a long time."
The store grew in haphazard stages, expanding outward or upward eight
times after Joseph Lowthian Hudson started selling dry goods at Gratiot and
Farmer in 1891. Each addition had its own architect, its own engineer, its
own I-beam-and-concrete vertebrae. Each had acres of ceiling layered with
lead-based paint and miles of pipe swaddled in asbestos.
The People Mover trundles along Farmer 15 feet from the mezzanine. The
Hudson's tower, 25 stories above the pavement, looms over the track and the
branch library across the street.
A bolt falling from that height could kill. A beam could cripple the
train. One of the two hulking, 30-foot-tall water tanks that fed the sprinkler
system could dig a crater. There is no room for error and no room to work.
On the mezzanine, Adamo aims his light at a squared column. The wooden
cornice remains intact, but the marble that covered a layer of cement was
carted off years ago. Where the cement was hammered away at the base, the
light shows a rusty I-beam.
"You've got a zillion just like this, " Adamo says. "That adds another
element. If we wanted to cut the beams with a torch, first we'd have to chip
away all this concrete."
In Adamo's lexicon, an element is a complication. Four levels of basement
are an element. If the basements turn out to extend below the sidewalk on
Woodward Avenue -- meaning the sidewalk won't support a crane -- that's an
element, too.
In analytical moments, Adamo sounds like an engineer, which he is. In
practical moments, he sounds like an MBA, which he also is. The rest of the
time, he sounds like a guy who gave up softball last year to concentrate on
roller hockey.
You can talk about redevelopment, he says, and you can campaign on it,
"but if you really mean it, you have to start wrecking."
AT FIRST, Adamo wanted to put things up, not tear them down.
He majored in civil engineering at Michigan State and took a job at
MichCon in 1979, hoping to design roads and bridges. His father's company was
flattening the Crowley's building downtown and Adamo liked to wander by on his
lunch hour, but he was never tempted to grab a sledgehammer.
Then John Sr. got the Dodge Main contract, "and he put on the full-court
press." After six months of independence, John Jr. came back to the fold.
John Sr., the son of a builder, was also a builder until the mid-1960s.
Then came a down cycle, and close behind it a realization: Builders may
slump, but wreckers are always busy.
John Jr. started directing traffic at his father's job sites before he was
old enough to drive. He moved on to minimum-wage grunt work, lugging and
stacking and sweating. There was majesty to it. "You don't get crowds, " he
observes, "to watch a building go up."
His father retired last year, having taught Adamo the creative side of
destruction. Now Adamo is imparting the same lessons to his brother Richard,
26, occasionally at high volume.
"He had my dad to holler at him, " Richard says. "I've got him to holler at
me."
When thousands of tons of brick and steel are about to topple, there is no
time to consider hurt feelings. Richard understands. At 5-foot-11, his brother
stands three inches taller, but they see eye-to-eye on most things.
Both, for instance, appreciate the buildings they have laid flat.
"I try to learn some of the history, " John Adamo says. "What did they do
here? How long ago?"
At Hudson's, the debris is thick with clues.
A YELLOWED PLACARD sits atop a pile of wood and plaster. "Gigantic Downhill
Ski Package Sale!" Another poster identifies itself as a Trak Boot Conversion
Chart: A child's size 7 is a women's size 4 is a European size 36. Crumpled
sales slips, faded beyond legibility, share floor space with the jagged
remains of a fluorescent light.
In a city where copper pipe is hard currency, looters and owners can be
almost indistinguishable. Hudson's has been decimated by both.
The elevators used to have brass doors. Now they have none. Escalators,
stripped of their stainless steel steps and sides, are reduced to gruesome
skeletons.
Paint chips from the ceiling crunch underfoot like peanut shells on the
floor of a bar. Fraying sleeves of insulation sit in corners like fat white
snakes.
"Asbestos, " Adamo warns. "You don't want to touch it."
Adamo wears a hard hat, jeans and a tan Carhartt jacket, zipped high.
Outside, the sun will eventually push the temperature toward 50. Inside, with
the wind howling through shattered windows, he can see his breath.
Over several hours, traversing various levels and climbing all the way to
the roof, he will forget the cold. He will have to strain to remember the
Hudson's of his childhood.
Just beyond the main entrance, near a chandelier so caked with grime no
one has bothered to take it, is a ramp of bricks and planks. Adamo studies it
briefly, then shakes his head in disgust and admiration. "They drove a
forklift up to the mezzanine."
Most building strippers are more subtle. They take copper pipe or thick
copper wire, and leave behind liquor bottles and the plastic foam tubs that
hold Coney Islands to go. Ashes and black stains mark the spots where looters
or squatters have built fires.
Along one wall, Adamo finds a series of 6-foot-long cast- iron radiators,
broken from their moorings. "Only way to get one out is to throw it through a
window, " he says wryly. "A little obvious."
THE RADIATORS will ultimately belong to whoever knocks down the building.
Salvage rights are part of the deal. Their worth, like so much associated with
the demolition, is undetermined.
A long row of white orb light fixtures hangs unbroken on the fourth floor,
"but you'd have to find one of those nouveau art deco restaurants to sell them
to." The terra-cotta roses around the building's facade are stunning, but
saving them would cost money that might not be recouped and time that might
not be available.
Greater Downtown Partnership, the nonprofit owner of the building,
expects the demolition to cost $12 million to $15 million and take 14 to 18
months.
Adamo concurs. Figure $3 million to cart away the rubble, he says. Figure
$3 million or $4 million to remove the asbestos, a process that includes
technicians in decontamination suits rappelling down elevator shafts. That's
at least $6 million, "and you haven't wrecked the building yet."
Adamo Demolition is one of two dozen companies -- half from out of state
-- that submitted their qualifications to do the job. Greater Downtown
Partnership will choose an undetermined number of finalists, then turn them
loose to examine the building and prepare bids.
