Hard Rock demolition is 3 months behind schedule

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Despite a handful of recent milestones — the complete removal of the upper floors, the opening of the river-bound side of Canal Street — the craggy wreckage remains, gnawed at by excavators still digging into the concrete months after the site was supposed to be cleared.

The original timeline to pick the building apart included a promise the site would be empty by October, but that deadline, which would have seen the building fully removed a year after its initial collapse, has come and gone, and 1031 Canal Street Development LLC — the team behind the original hotel project led by Mohan Kailas — has given little indication of the reason for the delays.

City officials said they did not know when the demolition would be far enough along that they could reopen streets in an area that before the coronavirus pandemic was typically bustling with tourists and workers. They referred all questions about the demolition to the developers.

Late Friday, 1031 Canal attorney Stephen Dwyer told WWL-TV the owners expect the site to be cleared by the end of February. A source familiar with the demolition told WWL-TV earlier in the week that if things progress as planned, the lake-bound side of Canal could be open by the end of February and Rampart could be opened in April.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell told WWL-TV that the end of the demolition has been "a long time coming."

"We have had to keep the accountability on the ownership," she said.

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The pulling apart of the wreckage began last spring, after seven months in which the city and the developers were at an impasse over the best way to bring the rest of the building down. Both sides eventually agreed to forego an implosion in favor of a potentially less risky demolition.

With the pandemic turning attention away from the calamity over the past year, there has yet to be a full public accounting of the circumstances that led to the building’s failure.

The only public report issued on the collapse was a Citation and Notice of Penalty released in April by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which detailed alleged violations of federal regulations by the building’s engineers, Heaslip Engineering LLC, related to its design of beams and other load-bearing structures. It also alleged safety violations against another 10 companies on the job.

Blame is expected to be assigned through myriad lawsuits that were filed in the wake of the collapse and which are likely to take years to resolve.

The city has so far spent more than $5 million in its response to the disaster and lost an uncertain amount of sales tax and other revenue because of the closures that accompanied it, Cantrell spokesperson Beau Tidwell said in an email last week.

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