Day 308/365

     Monday/yesterday/day 308 was a pretty quiet work day. I went on a tour with an MLive reporter in the morning of two buildings in downtown Saginaw that have been in the local news quite a bit recently. The Bancroft and Eddy buildings have changed hands over the years, and most recently it seems they were both assisted living homes. They've been closed down for a while, but have recently been bought by an investment/construction group that are renovating the buildings and hoping to turn them into upscale apartments in order to bring more people/business back to the downtown area. The décor left over from the last owners was all pretty outdated, but the grand ballroom in the Bancroft building had some beautiful detail work still intact. Luckily the group is planning on retaining as much of the buildings' historical significance as possible, and have some nice plans to restore the ballroom as well. 

Day 302/365

     Yesterday/day 302 one of my assignments was touring the construction going on at a local power plant in the Bay City area. This particular facility used to be one of the worst sources of mercury pollution in the state of Michigan, but is currently updating pollution control equipment throughout the facility to be in compliance with new EPA guidelines that'll take effect in 2015. It was a pretty interesting tour, but my favorite part by far was getting to go up on the cat walk with one of the heads of construction. It was a great view, albeit an extremely cold one. 

Day 274/365

     Yesterday/day 274 consisted of another demolition site assignment. Yet another building in Saginaw is being torn down, and the razing began yesterday. I've happened to cover each of the demolitions that have gone on since June, and with the same construction company being at all of them, I'm now on a first-name basis with have of the crew.

Day 233/365

     I realize that it's been ages since I had a video or audio entry, so today I'm putting the 'multimedia' back into my multimedia challenge! I finally got around to shooting some video for work today, and thought that some of the footage would be a great addition to this project. The historic former Mill End building that I photographed a while ago, (to jog your memory, I put some of my favorites on my website here), has been schedule to be torn town for quite awhile, and the demolition started today. I took quite a few photos and shot some video in between. While I think demo. sites can be pretty cool to photograph, I was a little sad to see this building go. I only got to see it at its worst, (it had been abandoned for years and it'd be much too expensive for anyone to save it), but even with the damage it had undergone I still thought it had so much character. I wish I could've seen it in its glory.

If you'd like to see photos from today, or the other video I put together, you can find them under the photo and video tabs on my MLive profile.

Day 126/365

     Today I mainly covered the demolition of the old Plaza Hotel in downtown Saginaw. I've never actually seen a building being demolished before, so I thought it was interesting to see for the first time. It went slower than I thought it would; they started with the wrecking ball and bulldozer today and have only got maybe one fifth of it down. The paper will probably be going back to get pictures throughout the week as more of it comes down, but I'll be in Bay City for work tomorrow through Friday so by the time I go by there next it could very well be leveled, (most of the debris will probably be there though, the construction workers thought it would take about a week to tear the building down, and about a month to clear everything out). If you'd like to see any more of my photos from the demolition site, there's an MLive gallery set up here.