Viewers drawn to demolition of ZCMI Center

Two-year-old Mecheal Mortenson was riding with his dad downtown Friday when he spotted something that really caught his interest: a giant orange machine chewing apart a building.

"Cool! Cool!" he shouted.

Knowing his son's love of cranes, backhoes, bulldozers and other large machinery, Chris Mortenson did what any good father would do: he parked the car and took the boy to watch the destruction.

"He loves this stuff," Chris Mortenson said as his son played on the ground with a toy backhoe. "When he sees stuff like this all he does is talk and talk about it in his little language."

And it seemed Mecheal wasn't the only one who thought it was cool. Throughout the day, there were usually at least 10 people — and often many more — standing or sitting on the sidewalk south of 100 South gazing up at the demolition of the First Security Annex building across the street.

"It's mesmerizing," said spectator Charlie Ehlert.

Ehlert filmed the destruction for several hours Friday with a small video camera on a tripod. He said he plans to sell the footage to a stock film agency that would then sell it to companies looking for footage of demolition.

The demolition also attracted many who work downtown.

"What it really is about is how to avoid work in the office on a Friday afternoon," said a spectator who declined to give his name. He and a colleague watching the demolition said they used to work in the building, and were happy to see it go.

The machine that Mecheal was so excited by is called a high reach excavator, and it was bought specifically for the project, said Grant Mackay, owner of Grant Mackay Demolition, the company in charge of demolition for the City Creek Center project.

The excavator has a giant steel claw at the end of a long arm. Starting at the top of the building, the machine's operator uses the claw, which can rotate, to pull apart a building piece by piece.

Normally, destroying a building with this method would take seven to 10 days, Mackay said. However, the process will be slower in this case because part of the building houses equipment still being used in the rest of the First Security complex and must be left intact a while longer, Mackay said.

Some of the spectators were wishing for a quicker, more dramatic method of destruction.