Aerial ballet goes swimmingly as pool is lifted to high-rise roof
Pilot Glenn J. Smith hovered over Koreatown early Saturday morning, a long rope hanging taut from the underside of his turquoise-and-white Bell Super 204 helicopter.
Dangling at rope’s end was a piece of a swimming pool.
More precisely, it was the wall of a nearly $200,000 stainless steel pool, intended for the posh roof garden of a new 22-story condominium tower called the Mercury.
As passersby craned their necks and cameras clicked, Smith began to lower the 3,700-pound piece of steel into a rectangular pool bed atop the building at the busy intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” he had said the night before.
For dog-walkers and latte-sippers on the sidewalks below, this real-life pool construction drama was as good or better than a “Die Hard” film shoot.
In Los Angeles, the cradle of swimming pool civilization, roof-top pools are all the rage.
Skyrocketing real estate prices are spurring the development of new residential towers downtown and west along Wilshire Boulevard, a trend some call the “Manhattanization” of Los Angeles.
“The dirt is so expensive, you have to use it multiple times,” said Daniel P. Gehman, a principal at TCA Architects and lead designer for the renovation of the former Getty Oil Co. headquarters.
The Mercury’s roof, with the obscure but chic title “23,” will have a fitness center, pool, Jacuzzi and a grassy area. Its design features include a steel-framed walkway with a white tensile roof and a white terrazzo path leading to a flaming cauldron, purchased from a Santa Ana firm that makes tank lids.
“We wanted the rooftop to make people think of the archeological discovery of a Greek ruin,” Gehman said.
Of course, the design calls for a pool, 40 feet long and 15 feet wide.
Which leads to the obvious question: How does one put a heavy-sided, tile-lined, water-filled swimming pool atop a 22-story high-rise?
“Building a pool on top of a building is different than putting one in the ground,” said Suzanne Barrows, spokeswoman for the Assn. of Pool and Spa Professionals in Alexandria, Va.
The most popular building material for swimming pools is gunite, a mixture of sand and cement.
But gunite is difficult to apply in high-up areas, and it weighs too much for the roof of a renovated building such as the Mercury. So developers chose stainless steel.
Because the residential tower was not built from scratch, it lacks a construction crane that could lift the pieces to the roof. And the location on busy Wilshire Boulevard made the job even tougher.
So construction managers hired Smith, who owns Long Beach-based Airlift Construction Services, to place the pool pieces on the roof. The pool pieces weighed between 400 and 3,700 pounds. To prepare for the airlift, workers laid the pieces on the roof of an adjoining two-story parking garage.
Planners worried that early morning fog or wind could delay the job.
But a pale sun was rising over Koreatown at 7 a.m. as Reggie Sully, a manager with McCoy Construction, gave eight workers a safety briefing.
Preparing for the airlift was a lot like coordinating a wedding, with many players and moving parts, he said later.
Smith, 48, of Seal Beach airlifted the letters for logos at the tops of the US Bank Tower and other office towers in downtown Los Angeles. His air deliveries have included pianos, cars and even a life-sized replica of an elephant for the Jungle Ride show at Disneyland.
People often ask if he has fun at his job.
“When I hear people talk about fun, that’s not the word I would use,” Smith said. “It’s very hazardous, very stressful. One little mistake could cost your life or someone else’s.”
But he talks about his work with a low-key passion, recalling how he helped relight the beacon atop City Hall and lowered a wildlife biologist into bald eagle nests so the rare eggs could be removed and incubated, and the young eagles returned to their mothers.
The eagle project on Catalina Island was featured in the “Killer Jobs” segment on the cable television channel “Animal Planet.”
Although Smith once moved a Jacuzzi to the late Rodney Dangerfield’s penthouse patio, this was the first time he was hired to deliver a swimming pool.
Smith was due to arrive at 8 a.m. from a job in Ontario, where he had lifted equipment at a Target store construction site. As his arrival neared, the atmosphere grew more tense. Workers were stationed on the tower roof, on the garage roof and on the streets below, where they would direct traffic.
“I’m close to show time,” Sully said.
Then came the pulsating, rhythmic noise of Smith’s helicopter, echoing off the walls of the Mercury, the Wiltern Theater, the office building across Wilshire.
For the next 30 minutes, Smith flew up to the tower roof and down again, carrying more than a dozen “picks,” the term for loads in the airlift business.
As Smith navigated above them, Sully and his fellow workers on the roof moved in to attach the hook of the helicopter line to a load and then stepped back as he lifted off.
The last piece was a full-size Jacuzzi that Smith lifted as if it were a plastic Lego toy. The job done, he swooped off, leaving an admiring crowd behind.
“It was like a ballet,” Gehman said.
