It's clean, polish and gild at fire-damaged Broad St. landmark
123 South Broad has been burnished by repair crews after April's fire
Building trade workers from Brooklyn to Milwaukee have joined their Philadelphia union brothers from nine different trades keeping busy this summer restoring the fire-blackened gilded hand-plastered ceiling of 123 South Broad Street, the flagship branch of the region's dominant bank, currently called Wachovia.
After April's electrical fire poured smoke through the high halls, insurer Liberty Mutual agreed to pay "several million dollars" to pay workers to clean and shin-polish the marble and bronze and re-gild the ceiling plaster atop four floors of scaffolding, Joseph Eisenstein, vice president at landlord SSH Management LLC, told me. It's all due to come down this weekend, said Scott Bamford of general contractor Hunter Roberts Construction Group LLC, which managed the job with KSK Architects, whose office is in the massive office building, and engineers Thornton Tomasetti Inc. of New York, which also has an office here.
I asked supervisors Mike Bradley and Joseph Cusumano, from Remco Maintenance LLC in New York, how the visiting tradesmen are getting along in Eagles country. "I like Pat's better than Geno's," volunteered Bradley as he stooped to fit his hard hat under a plaster ridge without smudging new gold leaf.
Wisconsin-based painter Will Kolstad said he's worked in Philadelphia before, on City Hall's intricate ceilings. His coworkers walked by with palettes and art brushes for the precious gold leaf, looking more like professors at the nearby University of the Arts than veteran industrial painters.
It's been a stressful summer - "but you don't realize what you have until you suffer a bit of a loss," Eisenstein told me. "It's really been a revelation, the quality of the work in this building" from the early 1900s. "We need to ensure we've restored it with the best quality in mind."
While the scaffolding comes down this weekend, the job has another six weeks or so to run, Eisenstein told me. Contracts are still being negotiated to replace the Nicola D'Asceno stained glass over the massive bronze doors to Broad Street, Bamford said.