Demolition begins at historic Main Line estate

A wrecking crew began demolishing La Ronda today as hopes of saving the historic Bryn Mawr mansion disappeared in clouds of white dust.

A back hoe with giant pincers ripped into the second floor of the Spanish-style house at 8:05 a.m., five minutes after work was permitted to begin.

The tumbling rubble sent up dusty clouds amid a cacophony of crunching wood and glazed roof tiles and the tinkling of shattered glass.

The pincers were used to both hammer away at the building and pick off giant chunks of roof and wall.

The work proceeded at a steady but slow pace and it did not appear the demolition would be finished today.

Motorists in expensive cars slowed down at the estate's gate to see the back hoe pick apart the building.

"I'm despondent," said Doug Mellor, who lives in an outbuilding on the estate.

A man in tan SUV paused and opened his window.

"I think it's sad," said the man, who declined to give his name. "Part of this is the fault of [Lower Merion] township. They should have made it a historic site."

Before the wrecking, workers in white hard hats sized up examined the building and put up a yellow plastic fence at the gate to the estate.

A helicopter hovered over head.

Early arrivals could see through the second floor of the building because the stained-glass clerestory had been removed.

The demolition punctuated months of public controversy over the fate of the 80-year-old architecturally significant manor.

Shortly after Joseph Kestenbaum bought the house in March, behind a pair of corporate identities, he filed plans with the township to tear it down and replace it with a new house.

He faced no requirement to preserve La Ronda as a historically important property because its previous owner, Arthur J. Kania, had not voluntarily placed it on the township's protected list.

The demolition permit was issued a month ago, but in the $6 million transaction, Kania kept the right to spend 30 days salvaging artifacts before demolition could start.

His work came after weeks of Kestenbaum's own removal of fixtures from the house, and ended with the removal yesterday of carved stone frames whose stained-glass windows had already been hauled away.

While this played out, a public debate raged so intensely that Kania outed Kestenbaum as the secret new owner of the house, and both men hired public-relations representatives.

Preservationists built a "Save La Ronda" Web site and staged a protest in its driveway. Amid the outcry, a South Florida man offered to buy and move the home, but no deal was reached.