Pilot walls to tumble

Removing the newspaper building will take three weeks, a fraction of the old structure’s 50-year history.Anyone who’s nostalgic for the old Daily Pilot building on West Bay Street had better get a quick last look.

Workers on Friday were dismantling the 50-year-old building to make way for a small housing development. They started early in the week, but even by Friday morning, it was hard to tell from looking at the Bay Street side that the building was being slowly ground into rubble.

By noon, however, a steam shovel was chewing away at the roof overhang, and a mess of splintered wood, twisted metal rods, even a broken palm tree, lay in soggy piles around the site.

“Right now we’re just taking the siding off the exterior walls,” said Coen Antillon, a superintendent with Brea-based contractor CST Environmental.

“Once we drop everything off, what we do is we roll the machines on top of the wood and shred it up so we can haul it out of here.”

Taking the building down is about a three-week job from start to finish, and the demolition will likely generate about 4,000 tons of trash, Antillon said.