James B. Nelson

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The demolition of the Bradley Center is underway, and, rather than a wrecking ball, the building is being "deconstructed" one locker and luxury suite at a time.

Starting this week, dozens of Habitat for Humanity volunteers and workers have swarmed the former home of the Milwaukee Bucks. They're unbolting equipment, furniture, fixtures and other items that are then priced and trucked off to one of three Milwaukee County Habitat ReStore shops.

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Among the first artifacts to land in ReStores: lockers from the visitors' locker room priced at $125 each and clearly marked as coming from the Bradley Center.

"These are ready for someone's mudroom or for someone's garage," said Jake Weiler, deconstruction services manager for the Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity.

Other items include Milwaukee Admirals lockers — bench-style chairs with storage underneath for $65 each. Upper storage cabinets are $30. A fancy light fixture is $55.

Chairs from the arena's theater boxes are sold in "runs" at $30 per chair, so a six-seat section is $180.

Habitat workers have a binder with photos and prices for each type of item that will be salvaged. The pieces are carted into a lobby area, identified and priced, and then loaded onto a truck.

Habitat expects that it will be allowed to remove items from the locker rooms for the Bucks and Marquette University Golden Eagles men's basketball team. Final details haven't been worked out and prices for those lockers are not set.

A walk around the Bradley Center provided a bittersweet look at how the building won't be around for long — and how recently it was rocking. The air conditioning is off and the sound of power tools and workers calling out to each other ring through the empty halls.

Luxury suite No. 302 was stripped of seats, counters and plumbing fixtures. A visitor had to step around chunks of drywall and boxes of plumbing parts.

A nearby theater seating suite had quartz countertops leaning against a wall. Nearby were sheets of paper reserving seats for a guest, presumably from the arena's final event, a Bon Jovi concert.

The former Admirals locker room was picked clean as well, with battered, unfinished drywall where the lockers stood.

"Wow, this is where we would have post-game interviews," said Bucks communications coordinator Eric Kohlbeck, looking about the empty shell. "Pretty amazing."

Weiler estimates that Habitat will raise at least $50,000 from the Bradley Center equipment sales.

"Every dollar that we raise there we're using to build homes with," he said.

RELATED:Hunzinger engineers who built the Bradley Center will now help tear it down

The work at the Bradley Center is one of the numerous deconstruction projects that Habitat undertakes every week.

It's a well-organized, speedy operation. The Bradley Center visitors' locker room, for instance, was taken apart in a matter of hours.

Habitat workers can remove what the organization needs from a single-family home in less than a day, Weiler said.

"We can be doing a kitchen one day, a bowling alley another day," Weiler said. "I blocked off the entire month for just the Bradley Center."

The Bucks control the Bradley Center as part of the deal that led to the $250 million in public financing for Fiserv Forum, the team's new $524 million arena just to the north. The last Bradley Center event was held at the end of July and the grand opening of the new arena was a month later.

RELATED:Milwaukee Bucks' donations of Bradley Center equipment will help Habitat build new homes

Equipment and fixtures from the old arena were donated by the Bucks to Habitat, Milwaukee Public Schools, the electrical workers union and other organizations. The Bucks estimate that the salvaged material is worth in excess of $1 million.

Habitat's Weiler estimates that about 20 trucks with about 3,500 pounds of items will be gathered at the Bradley Center.

"A lot of that would otherwise have gone to a landfill," Weiler said.