Sinclair smokestack spared for now; preservationists must act quickly

City Hall has granted a stay of execution for the leaning, historic smokestack at the flood-and-fire-damaged, former Sinclair meatpacking plant.

Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, said on Monday, though, that the historic preservation community will have to hustle to find the expertise and the resources to make a case to save the smokestack even as city, state and federal officials are near the start of demolishing most of the plant around it.

The 100-year-old, 165-foot-high smokestack, too, had been slated for a quick demolition in the wake of a December fire at the sprawling, abandoned plant, the second fire there since damage from the June 2008 flood.

The latest fire convinced city, state and federal officials to classify the plant and the smokestack as an imminent threat to public health and safety and to approve an emergency demolition, to be paid for mostly with dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

However, Maura Pilcher, chairwoman of the city's Historic Preservation Commission and assistant director at the historic Brucemore mansion, intervened and asked city officials to pause to allow time for an expert to study the smokestack and see if it could be saved.

Last week, too, City Council members Pat Shey and Justin Shields called on Eyerly and others to see what the city could do to keep the smokestack. It is more than a “wobbly stack of bricks,” Shey said.

On Monday, Eyerly said the goal, if the smokestack is to survive, is to quickly study the damage to it and the prospects for fixing it, and then stabilize it and, eventually, restore it.

The city is in the process of awarding a bid to a firm to begin demolition at the site, and many of those firms have expressed a concern, he said, about working in the fall zone of a leaning smokestack with the vibrations of heavy equipment and falling walls all around it.

Eyerly said the demolition can begin on one part of the plant to buy time for a study of the smokestack to be completed. But within about 60 days, demolition crews will be in the area of the smokestack, he said.

“So we're scrambling here to see even if it's possible (to keep the smokestack),” he said. “This is somewhat a stay of execution to buy it some time and still get started with demolition. But there's no guarantee we'll be able to come up with a plan.”

Eyerly said estimates have put restoration of the smokestack at $1.2 million with the cost to stabilize it for restoration in the six-figure range.

The preservation commission's Pilcher on Monday thought an expert study of the smokestack could be complete within 10 weeks, and she put the cost of stabilizing it at about $60,000.

Pilcher said she and others already are seeking funds for the work from the National Trust for Historic Places and from elsewhere, and she added that she and others realize that City Hall's spending priorities right now are with flood victims and flood-impacted businesses.

“We've asking, ‘Do no harm (to the stack), and we'll try to find a way to pay for it,” she said.

Pilcher said she doesn't want demolition crews hurt by a falling smokestack, and so saving it is “not at all cost,” she said. But a pause, she added, might result in a way to keep what otherwise would be lost.