Last team at Candlestick Park is bent on demolition

Workers continue the demolition effort at Candlestick Park on Feb. 4, 2015. Workers continue the demolition effort at Candlestick Park on Feb. 4, 2015. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 79 Caption Close Last team at Candlestick Park is bent on demolition 1 / 79 Back to Gallery

Candlestick Park was the perpetual butt of gibes about its temperature, winds, discomfort and inaccessibility — and it sat there for six decades on the edge of San Francisco Bay and took it.

But it cannot withstand one final assault, by giant mechanical dinosaurs that eat up the plastic seats and the metal grandstands. In a few days, bigger mechanical dinosaurs will arrive to begin eating up the concrete superstructure itself.

The wrecking machines lurch from one sacred spot to another, pulling the stadium apart. They stagger over the field where Willie Mays caught baseballs over his shoulder. They pile old seats on the turf where Dwight Clark caught footballs over his shoulder.

Video: Candlestick Park is slowly coming down

The wrecking machines, and the men operating them, have no time for sentiment. The clock is running and the boss is watching.

The wreckers paused briefly around noon Wednesday to celebrate the end of the easy half of the stadium’s demolition.

“It’s a little trickier than wrecking a building,” said head wrecker Larry Thomas of Silverado Contractors, the company hired to perform the demolition. It’s trickier because wreckers don’t get a lot of practice wrecking stadiums compared to wrecking buildings.

But it’s still a fun thing to do, he said. A 60-year-old man likes to operate a wrecking machine as much as a 4-year-old boy likes to watch him do it.

“My workers love to wake up in the morning and come down here and do this,” Thomas said.

'Precise demolition’

Candlestick is being wrecked with mechanical dinosaurs instead of with wrecking balls or dynamite to keep the dust and debris at bay. Dynamite would have been much quicker but much messier, and neighbors howled louder than Giants fans of the 1970s watching another one slip away.

“We’ve gravitated away from wrecking balls,” said site manager Jermaine Smith. “You see those in movies. This is precise demolition. You don’t do that with wrecking balls.”

As he spoke, one of the machines snatched a chunk of grandstand Section 37 the same way the T. rex snatched up the lawyer in “Jurassic Park.”

Thomas said taking down a stadium is a lot like putting up a stadium. You do it in stages. You wear hard hats. You’re surrounded by fragments of the structure instead of the whole thing. There’s one big difference, however.

“When you build something, the main danger is falling,” he said. “When you wreck something, the main danger is something falling on you.”

Everything about the job is eerie. Workers wear orange and black, but they’re safety vests instead of Giants jerseys. Fragments of huge billboards ring the grandstands, their messages half lost, never to return. A fast-food billboard urges fans to visit “Jack In The,” and the remains of the KNBR billboard render the station’s call letters “KNPP.” The scoreboard says there are no timeouts left, and the dinosaur, munching on Row 7, agreed.

A red-tailed hawk, who hadn’t gotten the memo, was busy building a nest in one of the banks of stadium lights. Its long-term prospects were dubious.

Memories are everywhere, but only for those who remember them. Smith, who was keeping an eye on his workers from just about the same spot where Mays kept an eye on the bat of Hank Aaron, had no time for daydreams. Such thoughts never occurred to him.

'Some other time’

“I wasn’t even born then,” he said, looking in the opposite direction of home plate. “That was some other time.”

Around the stadium were piles of ugly orange plastic stadium seats, the ones that the city was unable to unload on sentimental fans for $649 a pair. They will be ground up and recycled into whatever ugly orange stadium seats get recycled into.

When the wreckers are done, perhaps by late spring, the construction workers will arrive. They will begin building what developers are calling an “urban outlet mall,” which will cost around $200 million and will open around 2017.

San Francisco, which never had a place like Candlestick Park before, has never had an urban outlet mall. As it did with the stadium, San Francisco is hoping for the best.

Video: Candlestick demolition

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com