GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Lazy clouds floated through a blue sky above the crane operator as he gently rested his hands on the controls. With the push of a lever, the wrecking ball lurched toward the building.

The heavy reaper rested lightly at first against the steep, slate roof. A handful of tiles swirled to the ground, landing on sand spread around the building to cushion the impact from falling stone and brick.

It was 10:25 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 27, 1969. The death of City Hall had begun.

The crowning blow would not come for another month. On Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1969, the iconic clock tower — a sentry that had watched its fate inch ever closer for nearly a decade — was finally sent crashing to earth at the corner of Ottawa Avenue and Lyon Street in downtown Grand Rapids.

In the words of present-day developer Sam Cummings: “What a travesty.”

More than four decades after the 81-year-old Gothic Victorian-era building was ground into dust, few people would disagree with that sentiment. The destruction of Grand Rapids’ once magnificent City Hall is still regarded by many in the community as an egregious mistake of the kind that breeds long-term ill will.

The very notion that anyone would tear down the once-imposing structure, which exists now only in photos and scattered pieces, is simply dumbfounding to those who see a picture of it for the first time.

"Grand Rapids had that?!" Yes. It did.

The self-inflicted wound still stings for people like Mary Kimmel, who threw herself into the campaign to save a building that some considered Grand Rapids’ only substantial 19th century architectural treasure.

Old City Hall and Mary Stiles, as she was known then, have been indelibly linked since that Monday in October when she chained and handcuffed herself to the wrecking ball in a final, but ultimately fruitless act of defiance.

“There was nothing wrong with it,” she maintains today. “It was a good, solid building. It was right downtown and it could have been reused.”

And the thing most galling is that today, it almost certainly would have been.

McKinley era 'dust catcher' vs. beautiful foil

Looking back, it’s apparent that few realized City Hall was even in danger until its fate had largely been sealed.

A 1952 planning dept. sketch shows new construction on the site of old City Hall. This was one of numerous sketches and renderings published periodically in the newspaper that foretold the destruction of the building.

Starting in 1952, there were periodic but strong hints in the newspaper that the building was doomed, but it wasn’t until around 1964 that folks bent on preservation were able to coalesce and make some real noise.

Although the campaign was a slow build, it achieved critical mass in 1969 when the new Kent County Council for Historic Preservation took its fight for old City Hall to federal court in Detroit, and the court of public opinion nationwide.

Grand Rapids became a poster child for a growing number of preservation-minded Americans tired of watching the urban renewal wreckers pick apart their neighborhoods and downtowns.

“Old statehouse domes may fall like autumn leaves this year, and it won’t do any good to tell it to city hall — that’s a candidate for demolition, too,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in a September 1969 New York Times op-ed “Open Season on the Nation’s Monuments.”

Grand Rapids City Hall figured prominently in Huxtable’s story, which featured a picture of the building, a near twin of the Richmond, Va. City Hall, captioned “realization comes with a hole in the ground.”

Preservationists claimed the populace and history were on their side, and Public Enemy No. 1 was the Union Bank & Trust Co., which for several years had a contract to buy part of the land under City Hall, adjacent to the bank’s new 10-story headquarters building at 200 Ottawa Ave. NW, which a Times reporter in 1969 described as looking “like an ice cube tray.”

Union Bank had been heavily involved in the downtown urban renewal project for several years by the time preservationists cast the bank and its chairman, Edward J. Frey, as chief villains in the Save City Hall campaign.

The architects of urban renewal: From right, city commissioner Arlon G. Ley, consultant John Paul Jones, Union Bank head & Grand Rapids Chamber President Edward J. Frey, and John J. Foley, vice president of the Downtown Council in a Oct. 1959 photo showing the group with an economic report that hoped to lure investors to Grand Rapids' urban renewal project.

“It was very uncomfortable for my father,” said David Frey, chairman of the Frey Foundation and former chairman of Union Bancorp, since folded into JP Morgan Chase. “He and the board of directors really thought they were investing in the city’s future.”

By 1969, preservationists had built what they considered a pretty strong case for saving, if not the whole building, then at least the southwest corner clock tower.

The group floated ideas like recycling the building into offices, restaurants, shops, a museum — even a children’s playground on the ground floor. They cited engineers and architects who maintained that if only the tower portion could be saved, it had the structural integrity to be freestanding.

Preserving the building, which looked as if it were beamed into Grand Rapids from Transylvania when seen next to all the modern construction, would cap off a very successful urban renewal project partly by default, they argued.

“The tower would be a beautiful foil against the modernistic buildings being built downtown,” said preservation advocate Warren Rindge in 1969.

The group was encouraged by the newly-passed National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and changes in the urban renewal laws that allowed historically significant buildings to remain within a project area without necessarily jeopardizing the federal funding. They convinced the federal government to add the building to the National Register of Historic Places in May 1969.

But preservationists would get little encouragement from the city and none from the Grand Rapids Press editorial board, which took a dim view of the effort to save a “McKinley era dust-catcher” sitting on land pledged to Union Bank.

The Union Bank building (now Chase Building) at 200 Ottawa Ave. NW rises during construction in 1966. Also seen in the photo are the top of McKay Tower, the new Old Kent Bank building (now Fifth Third Center), the tower atop the Kent County Building, the old Grand Rapids City Hall and the Fox Deluxe brewery.

“We find it impossible to believe that any great number of Grand Rapids taxpayers would approve investing up to a million dollars … in preserving a building for which the city has no need and which it promised the redevelopers to raze before they had invested millions of their own money in Vandenberg Center,” read a Press editorial on April 24, 1967.

The Press, the city and Union Bank were not alone in the bring-on-the-wrecking-ball chorus. Preservation is a cornerstone of city development today, but attitudes were very different then. Locally, the movement was taking baby steps as an ethos. ZZ Lydens, in his 1966 ‘The Story of Grand Rapids” describes the Save City Hall drive as “ineffectual clamor” several years before the issue was rendered moot.

The impracticality of municipal offices spread hither and yon into annexes and corridors because of limited space in a vintage building was an argument that resonated with many.

Enough with the preservation nonsense, wrote Arlene M. Feringa in The Press in August 1969: “We are being bombarded by letters from all over the country, obviously solicited, petitioning us to ‘Save City Hall,’ a structure which somehow has assumed historic status (probably due to the fact that it hasn’t collapsed of its own dead weight, rot and grime)…”

It was an easy slam because the building did look grimy. Decades of coal heating in Grand Rapids had blackened the façade of many downtown buildings. Inside, years of deferred maintenance furthered the perception of old City Hall as a piece of obsolete junk that fire inspectors had once condemned.

“It’s an old trick,” said Dennis Morrow, pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul parish and the Grand Rapids Diocese archivist. “They weren’t doing anything to fix City Hall. If the toilet broke, they put up an ‘out-of-order’ sign and let it stay there for weeks. When people complained, they’d say ‘Yeah, we need a new building.’

“There are subtle ways of driving a message home.”

The let’s-junk-it attitude was a full pendulum swing away from the building’s dedication day in 1888, when the new “handsome and commodious edifice, graceful in design and solid in construction” was characterized as a leaving-behind of the Grand Rapids’ pioneering days and its entrance into the rank of national cities.

Elijah E. Myers

The architect, Elijah E. Meyers, had also designed the state capitols of Michigan, Texas and Colorado as well as numerous county courthouses and municipal buildings around the world.

The $314,800 City Hall was the biggest bill Grand Rapids taxpayers had ponied-up for to date in an era where one could get a tooth extracted for 25 cents. Carriages lined the streets and many of the city’s 75,000 residents attended the ceremony.

Eight decades later, city employees were “just glad to get the hell out” as they packed boxes of dusty maps and records, many simply thrown away, as they prepared to vacate it for a new glass tower.

There was a twinge of nostalgia in the mid-August heat, but just barely.

“I like this place,” said long-time city manager secretary Helen Meade. “It was okay with me and I don’t care that much about air conditioning.”

Legal uncertainty, protests mark final showdown

As 1969 wore on and both sides readied their guns for a final showdown, a “mildly militant” offshoot of the preservation council began to experiment with civil disobedience.

“Help Save Me” pleaded a large banner hung from a tower window on Aug. 19, 1969.

Officials quickly ordered it cut down, but building managers had to jimmy the tower access lock with a screwdriver after someone removed the doorknob. How the banner-hangers entered and exited the locked building unseen was never explained.

The banner flew again a few days later when a rented crane suspended the plea above the street corner while a woman dressed in princess garb paraded around Calder Plaza, flanked by a pair of hooded executioners representing Union Bank and City Manager Julian Orr.

"Help Save Me" reads a 45-foot banner draped from a window in the old City Hall clock tower on April 18, 1969. The banner was created by the Citizens to Save City Hall group, an offshoot of the Kent County Society for Historic Preservation. When city administrators saw the banner, they ordered it removed, but building managers found the fourth floor attic door locked and the doorknob removed. After the banner was cut down, activist Mary Stiles (now Mary Kimmel) spirited it away, promising it would fly again. City leaders scratched their heads at how the locked building was entered. No banner-hangers were found inside the room

Tensions escalated as a City Commission vote neared on whether to delay the wrecking six months while a formal preservation game plan was drafted.

City leaders were lukewarm toward preservation from the get-go, declining at various points to even study the proposal. Officials largely shrugged and said their hands were tied by contractual obligations to the Vandenberg Center redevelopers, who would have had to sign off, as a group, on saving City Hall.

Although the federal government threw its moral support behind preserving the building after its addition to the National Register, it had little leverage because the city’s urban renewal plans pre-dated the 1966 historic preservation act.

Union Bank made its position clear: The building must come down.

The institution wanted to build two more buildings, one on either side, and the City Hall site was needed for parking in the meantime. The wrinkle was that the clock tower was not on property being turned over to the bank, although most of City Hall was. The tower stood in the public right-of-way.

Still, bank officials insisted that urban renewal contracts mandated total clearance.

“The City Commission and the community should not be bulldozed into thinking this is a national landmark,” said William Gill, assistant vice president at the bank.

When the commission voted to allow demolition, the preservationists sought an injunction in court. They didn’t get far, however. In early October, U.S. District Judge Thomas Thorton ruled the group had no legal standing to bring a lawsuit.

Instead of an appeal, preservationists turned their attention to convincing the City Commission to save just the tower. The council waffled for a week on whether to seek a declaratory court judgment to resolve the legal uncertainty around the situation before caving entirely to the bank’s wishes.

On Oct. 31, 1969, commissioners sealed the tower’s fate by declining to seek a court review. In the meantime, the wreckers were turned loose on the building’s northeast side, but not before Mary Stiles dramatized the losing battle.

She avoided jail that day thanks to her husband, Jack, who un-cuffed her after convincing wreckers to hoist her for the now-famous picture.

A few nights later, at 11 p.m. on Nov. 3, the ‘clang, clang’ of the tower bell woke the city from its slumber. Two men had climbed to the top with a bottle of brandy and a sledgehammer, determined to remind everyone of what was being lost.

The hour-long din drew about 75 people, who began chanting “Save our tower!” Police, unable to find their way to the top in the dark, called the fire department.

Donald Faasen and William Bouwsema were fined $50 and charged with creating a disturbance. Jack and Mary Stiles bailed them out of jail later that night.

“We took a 12-pound hammer into the bell tower, nailed ourselves in with spikes, took a drink of Christian Brothers brandy and swung away until the police and fire department combined came with ladders,” recalled Faasen.

“Finally, after we reached the 12:01 a.m. mark, we stopped.”

The clock tower falls on Dec. 2, 1969.

By the end of December, the site had been cleared and turned over to the bank. Despite assertions that bank officials intended major construction for the land, it spent the next three decades as a parking lot until the Kent County Courthouse was erected there in 2001. A sculptural homage to old City Hall occupies the courthouse steps today, built with the original clock tower faces and entrance stone coping.

Warnings that we would rue the day City Hall fell now seem prescient.

“Of course we don’t need the clock tower,” one preservation-minded businessman said. “But we don’t need our old wedding certificates, either, or the baby shoes we’ve had bronzed. We don’t really need the snapshots of the kids when they were growing up, but we hate to throw those things away …”

FINAL INSTALLMENT:

What did Grand Rapids learn from urban renewal? Quite a lot, it turns out. The series wrap-up will explain how the city changed after City Hall died and why we shouldn't expect to always live with Calder Plaza as it looks today.

Series Links

• Why GR chose to bulldoze downtown

• The NY consultant who sold renewal and became planning director

• The eminent domain case that pried the veil off redevelopment

• How 'World of Tomorrow' architects sculpted a new downtown

• Why old GR City Hall was destined for the wrecking ball

• Urban renewal: Slow-acting antidote or huge mistake?

Timeline:

• Key dates in GR renewal

Sidebars:

• History in the basement: Urban renewal booklet on Old Kent Bank

• Tale of two cities: Old GR City Hall's twin survives in Virginia

Interactive:

• Old and new downtown images collide

Photo Galleries

• 88 photos of old GR City Hall

• Old GR City Hall's twin survives in Virginia

• 100 photos of downtown renewal wrecking

• 65 photos of downtown GR before urban renewal

• 40 photos of downtown GR after urban renewal

• Grand Rapids Then & Now

• Renewal book showcases new Old Kent Bank

Videos:

• 16mm footage shows destruction of dimestore block

• Old footage shows changing downtown GR

• Gerald R. Ford at presidential museum dedication

• Wrecking ball foe Mary Stiles recalls fight for old City Hall

Garret Ellison covers business, government and breaking news for MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. Email him at gellison@mlive.com or follow on Twitter & Instagram