Building Just a Big Pushover : ‘The Kid Is Still in Me . . . I’d Rather Tear It Down’

Call him Doctor Destructo.

He revels in the crunch of a hydraulic ram as it relentlessly pounds concrete into smithereens. He takes joy in the irreversible thud that a building’s wall makes as it thumps to earth. The sound of a shattering plate glass window is music to his ears, solace for the soul of Steve Solis.

After eight years on the job, Solis is still having the time of his life. These days he is demolishing a downtown parking garage and the old Fox Theatre building to make way for Symphony Towers.

Solis and his co-workers with Mark McDowell Corp. love tearing things down. And apparently the desire to destroy things is shared by a lot of people.

“You’d be surprised the people that come by here that want to throw the bricks through the windows,” said McDowell foreman Mike Hodges. “They say, ‘Can I throw one of these? I’ve always wanted to do that.’ ”

For Solis, getting to pulverize, flatten, raze and devastate satisfies a natural impulse. Being paid for it is gravy.

Solis, 33, listened as his fellow crew members explained to a stranger why windows are broken out first in a demolition project: to reduce the likelihood of injuries from falling glass that can cut off a man’s arm, and to provide for ventilation.

“I do it just because I like to break glass,” Solis says.

“I thought you got tired of that when you did that Kaiser hospital,” someone counters.

“Hell no, man,” Solis replies. “I can break lots of glass. The kid is still in me. To hell with building it; I’d rather tear it down.”

Later, Solis deftly maneuvers his 11-ton backhoe and sets the tip of its hydraulic hammer rig against a foot-thick concrete wall. With a sure movement of his hands at the controls, he sends 1,300 foot-pounds of pressure into the case-hardened steel tip, which begins to pulse at 600 blows a minute. The engine revs. The hammer clangs. The decibels rise as the concrete disintegrates into dust, and a trace of a grin wrinkles the corner of Solis’ mouth.

For once, somebody put the right man in the right job.

“I loved breaking things as a kid,” Solis said. “I love doing it now. I couldn’t have found a better job. I love tearing up stuff.”

Solis’ co-worker, Butch Smith, who either wields a cutting torch or muscles a 90-pound jack hammer or a 45-pound rivet cutter on his errands of destruction, began his career on the other side, building fireplaces as a mason.

Now Smith finds himself ravaging the handiwork of other artisans.

“You find a lot of interesting things here,” Smith said. “The architecture work on the columns, the fanciness of them--you don’t see anymore. Today it’s all square or rectangle or glass. If you like antiques, it’s real interesting.”

Destroying craftsmanship doesn’t bother Smith. Someone has to do it. “It’s a challenge in a lot of ways,” Smith said. “It’s not like you can just tear it down. You have to know what you’re doing.”

The work is dangerous. A man can die in an instant if his attention lapses.

A week ago, an equipment operator on the Symphony Towers project narrowly missed being killed when the track hoe he was running crashed through a floor into the basement.

Hodges said he had warned the operator that the added weight of rubble had weakened the floor. But the machine strayed over the weakened section, and it gave way. Fortunately, the operator was unhurt.

On Thursday, Smith, Solis and others worked together as they prepared to drop a 20-foot section of wall. Using their hydraulic rams, Solis and co-worker Ron Laxson punched holes across the bottom of the wall, exposing the steel reinforcing rods. Working around the whirling rams, Smith and Jose Guzman busily cut through the rods.

As the rods were severed by the white-hot torches, Solis manipulated the arm of his ram over the top of the wall, holding it from accidentally falling in the wrong direction.

With the arm of the ram wrapped across the top of the nine-foot wall like an arm draped across a shoulder, Solis began to pull on the wall. The backhoe strained as a stream of water, to cut the dust, was trained on the area where the wall would fall. But the wall resisted, yielding only a section at the top.

Solis repositioned the arm. Again the backhoe strained, and a big grin creased Solis’ face as the wall went Whump!

Satisfaction is the best part of their demolition derby, the workers say--an almost sexual gratification, one joked.

“You don’t have any frustrations at night,” Smith said. “You know how people go home all mad and upset. (Here) you get to beat and tear things up. Just let it all fly loose. I run a jackhammer most of the time. I can really let loose with it. I can just beat on anything I want to. It’s a good release.”

There’s also the satisfaction of seeing the results of a day’s work. “It’s rewarding,” Solis said about his Operating Engineers Union job. “You can go home every day and see the progress that you made. We can go out and tear down a bridge in one night. The next day you go by and there’s no bridge there anymore.”

So what is the reason behind his drive to obliterate things?

“I don’t know,” Solis said. “Everybody has something in them where they enjoy doing something. They can’t explain it. I can’t explain it.”

Would he really work without pay?

“I’ve got to say I would,” he said, laughing. “I can’t help it. I consider myself God’s right-hand man (of destruction). When the end of the world comes, brother, I’m going to be right there.”