Wrecking firms: what goes up ...

Wrecking firms: What goes up...

His bookends are made out of railway steel. William M. Fenning keeps them in his office at Cleveland Wrecking Co. in Vernon as a reminder that his company lost more than $600,000 demolishing the Boston Elevated Railway. Scrap steel prices fell unexpectedly.

The industry that made "headache" balls famous, of course, hits a bonanza now and again. Aluminum scrap prices doubled while Cleveland was tearing down a Kaiser Aluminum plant in Louisiana. Scrap, though, is only half the game.

Demolition work is the big enchilada for the nearly 200 licensed demolition contractors who compete here, says Chuck L. Clark, who owns a Baldwin Park demo outfit called Three-D Service Co. He says the industry is worth about $100 million annually in Los Angeles County. Cleveland, the nation's largest demolition company, will probably take in 60 percent of that total, says Fenning, its president and CEO.

Razing highrises, houses, churches and pools is full of surprises. If your father's in the dirty, dangerous business, odds are better than average you'll join him. The yen for this line of work runs in families.

This week Cleveland operators are crashing a headache ball -- two-and-half tons of steel -- from a crane through walls of the Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles. The venerable church that had the "Jesus Saves" sign is becoming rubble.

A few blocks to the east, near Union Station, a crew is demolishing the Brew 102 brewery. These are but two of the 35 demolition jobs Cleveland currently has under way in the county, 550 worldwide.

Meanwhile, Glendale-based Viking Equipment Co. is demolishing two brick buildings at Arrowhead & Puritas Water Co. in South Central L.A., according to Secretary-Treasurer Mike Tredick. "Business has been pretty good for two years, and we still have a substantial backlog."

Clark's company just finished clearing a 20-acre shopping center in West Covina to make way for two high-rise office buildings and a Marriott hotel.

Cleveland Wrecking, with 450 employees in L.A. County and 3,500 altogether working around the globe, curiously has never done a job in Cleveland, Ohio, says Fenning. The wrecking company was founded 80 years ago by six brothers of the Rose family in Minneapolis to generate used building materials as an adjunct to their Rose Bros. new building supplies business.