Saturday, May 30, 2009

Big Things in the Air

When you're walking down the street (as I was early this morning) and you see this sight:

you know that something big is going to get lifted high into the air. Whenever these extendo-cranes show, it's seldom boring, although sometimes you've really got to wait while all the guys in orange vests talk about their feelings and hopes and dreams.

Ground zero for all this excitement is the big hole formerly known as the future home of the One Hotel and Residences at 2nd & Stewart. It's a dead project whose abandoned onsite construction offices I predicted would be sheltering the homeless by fall if things were left as they were. Apparently, other people might have come to the same conclusion. Either that or they needed those single-wides someplace else. But today was the day to get them out of there.

I didn't expect for things to happen so quickly. I thought there would be more discussions of feeling, hopes and dreams before anything got hoisted in the air. (Crane operators just go on and on with the feelings.) But gosh, I was wrong:



And then they did the same thing with the other one while I was at the gym. When I was done, this is what it looked like:

No more trailers! Now all they've got to do to make the place look normal-ish is get rid of the scaffolding that the portables were perched on. Then after that, they might want to fill in that big hole with dirt and make it a nice parking lot like it was before.

In conclusion, time spent watching one of these cranes in action is never wasted - unless you've got some other place to be, which I never do.

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