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Robyn Edie
Invercargill CBD Block Demolition Nearly Complete [file photo].
The last of the 43 buildings to be demolished in the Invercargill CBD block will be torn down in the coming days.
Invercargill Central is demolishing most of a huge CBD block that lines four streets and in its place will be building a multi-million dollar development that includes retail stores, office space and parking.
Invercargill Central’s project manager Geoff Cotton said Hannahs’ old store on Tay St was the last one still standing.
It would be torn down after the asbestos was removed the next day.
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“It should disappear during the week and it will be … the demolition guys will leave the project.”
It was a good milestone for the project, he said.
The Ceres demolition team had been working, with a few exceptions, such as the Covid lockdown, since late January.
The remaining buildings on the site were not owned by Invercargill Central and would not be torn down.
Invercargill Central director Scott O’Donnell, the man behind the project, said it would be great to finish the demolition so that construction work could begin.
“With the time we have lost, we are doing very well to recover,” O’Donnell said.
He was now hoping to have the new Farmers building, which would be the primary tenant in the retail section of the block, completed and opened in early 2022.
Discussions with many other potential retail tenants were still in the middle stage.
” We have a lot of time, if we open in 2022 for Farmers, and during 2022 for the rest, we are two years away.
” The retail world is messed up right now, everyone is suffering, so we are not expecting too much this calendar year. We will make sure to come back next year and get things done. ”
O’Donnell said he was satisfied with the public’s response during the last seven months of the demolition.
“People can see the progress, they can see their dead plane now, so we can go ahead and finish some works.”
He also noted that the new ILT hotel, a couple of blocks away, was being built at a “reasonable rate.”
Cotton said more than half of the 630 piles for the new CBD development were already in the ground and the rest would be ready by the first week of October.
Many of the walls, beams and columns of the new CBD buildings were being done off-site, so once the construction work got off to a good start, it would happen “pretty quickly.”
He expected the first walls to start building in late October or early November.
“This is a good time to start building, Spring.”
