State Office Windmill Up and On, Demolition Begins at IB Site
September 30, 2009
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Windmill at new state office building in the city's Johnson Street industrial park soars 125 feet high, with the blade reaching about 150 feet.
Out with the old.
In with the new.
Perhaps perfectly symbolic of Bay City's future, the same day the first large windmill in Bay City was turned on, demolition began at the old Industrial Brownhoist site.
It was Wednesday afternoon when the juxtaposition of events happened: removal of a historically important industrial complex and initiation of an alternative energy source geared for the 21st century economy.
Trucks, cranes, backhoes and other equipment of Bierlein Companies, Inc., Midland, rolled into the 48-acre IB site just two days after the city commission gave the OK for a demolition contract.
And, while demolition was beginning at IB, Kahn Spencer, project manager of Kent Power, of Kent City, Michigan, flipped the switch on the new 125-foot reciprocating windmill at the state office building.
"There isn't much wind to get her going today, but we'll see her moving soon," said Spencer.
He said his firm completed construction of the city's first large scale windmill the previous Friday. Only landscaping and erection of a fence around the windmill remained to be completed, officials have said.
Spencer said city zoning issues prevented location of the windmill at the first site proposed, nearer the Independence Bridge approach east of Bay Metro Transit. Instead, the windmill was erected next to the state office building.
The windmill will provide some of the power for the 25,000 square foot state building, housing the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Labor and Economic Growth. Excess power will be fed into the Bay City Electric Department grid through reverse metering.
The building is a model for environmental buildings, a functional office but also a demonstration project. Saginaw Valley State University is participating in a long term study of the building.
The building, located at 401 Ketchum Street between Bay Metro and GM Powertrain, is built on an abandoned brownfield site and will return this land to productive use and to the tax rolls. It is one of only about 30 LEED buildings in the country.
Bierlein officials at the IB site were too far away to get comments from, locked behind fencing that is necessary to keep the public, and nosy reporters, away.
The city Monday night approved a deal whereby Bierlein will demolish and salvage three of the old IB buildings, that date to the early 1900s, in exchange for a payment of $11,528 to the city. The deal is what is termed a "buy" contract that City Manager Robert V. Belleman had supported as beneficial to city finances.
According to Marvin Kusmierz, webmaster of Bay-Journal.com, a local history site, the company was founded in 1873 when a group of Ann Arbor and Saginaw businessmen purchased the McDowell Foundry Co. that had been operating on the site on the Saginaw River at the head of 12th Street.
(MyBayCity Photo by Dave Rogers)
The new firm, called the Industrial Works, did repair work on sawmill equipment and supplied galvanized piping for salt wells. In 1881, the company built the first railroad steam shovel made in the United States.
In 1895 William Clements, son of one of the founders, James Clements, took over the firm with a partner, Charles Wells. By 1896 the company had made the transition from a supplier of local sawmills to a major source of cranes for railroads nationwide.
By 1923 the Industrial Works had produced and sold 3,776 cranes. Its manufacturing facilities covered 29 acres and included 59 buildings with about 490,000 square feet of factory space.
In 1931 the firm merged with the Brown Hoisting Co., of Cleveland, becoming the Industrial BrownHoist. Cranes built here helped build the Panama Canal and the Mackinac Bridge.
Penn-Texas Co. acquired the firm in 1954 and sold it five years later to a hotel group in Miami Beach, Florida. Some business and journalistic sources considered the takeovers merely a device to strip cash out of the highly-profitable firm.
By 1960 IB was down to about 40 employees when American Hoist Corp. (AHC) of Minneapolis took over and it became the Industrial Brownhoist division. AHC closed the Bay City operations in 1983.
"I-B was a very significant part of American engineering history," said Ron Bloomfield, curator of the Bay County Historical Museum. "This company spread the fame of Bay City throughout the world." (Please see "Museum Curator Recalls Industrial Brownhoist, Employees Lament Job Losses," June 10, 2007.)
Besides the Panama Canal and the Mackinac Bridge, IB cranes helped build the Trans-Siberian Railroad, lifted the St. Louis Arch over the Mississippi River and raised the USS Maine, sunk in Havana harbor in 1898, marking the start of the Spanish-American War. ###
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