| Bringing down the big house: Demolition began on a 71-year-old building at Faribault’s prison as it grows to the largest in Minnesota |
By: Jim Hammerand
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Posted: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 11:56 pm
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jhammerand@faribault.com
FARIBAULT — Crews on Wednesday demolished the most visible symbol of what was before Faribault’s state prison.
The tear-down of the Redwood building, a 205-bed hospital built in 1937 for what was then the Minnesota School for the Feeble-Minded and Colony for Epileptics, began at 1 p.m. Wednesday.
The hospital, last used as such until it was transferred over to the Minnesota Department of Corrections in 1993, sat at the center of the complex. It was used as living quarters for inmates as recently as this year but had many dark corridors and blind corners that were not conducive to prison use.
“This was one of those old structures that we used the best that we could,” said Jim Lyons, prison spokesman.
The last inmates moved out in May, and the brick and concrete shell of what most recently served as a housing unit and services building had been gutted by Wednesday morning.
“It looked like a war zone. The building could be in downtown Baghdad,” Warden Connie Roehrich said.
The building could be completely razed before the weekend, said Blue Earth Environmental Co. owner Stuart Carleton. He estimated as many as 3,000 tons of rubble would be hauled away. A portion of that — the large chucks of limestone and other rock — could be recycled as gravel for highway bases and shoulders, he said.
“The industry is going through a tremendous amount of change,” Carleton said.
Green space will replace the old hospital building as the prison continues construction to house more inmates with better security. Since 2005, the Legislature has appropriated $128.8 million toward the prison expansion, now in it’s third and final phase.
Wednesday’s inmate count, at 1,473, was higher than any other state or federal prison in Minnesota.
— Staff writer Jim Hammerand may be reached at 333-3128.
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