Sun finally streams into Santa Rosa's former AT-T building

Downtown Santa Rosa's windowless eyesore is no more.

Workers punched huge holes in the side of the fortress-like former AT-T building on Tuesday, letting natural light stream into the structure for the first time and giving the public a glimpse of the building's transformation from concrete cube to modern glass-clad office building.

"This is going to be a beautiful building, and as these panels start to come out, people will start to see the transition begin," said developer Hugh Futrell.

Interior demolition work on the long-delayed redevelopment project dubbed Museum on the Square began in March, but aside from scaffolding the public saw little evidence of progress until Tuesday. That all changed when workers opened nine massive rectangular holes in the south side of the building facing the city's transit mall.

Architect Don Tomasi, whose firm TLCD designed the renovated new building and will occupy its third floor, has long said its tall ceilings and open floor plan would make ideal work space if the thick concrete walls could be replaced with large windows.

"When they were taking the panels off and the light came flooding into the interior I was surprised by how bright the inside of the building became," Tomasi said.

Each panel was cut from 9-inch-thick concrete walls by workers using remotely controlled saws with large diamond-tipped cutting blades. The saws ran along tracks mounted to the walls and when they passed through embedded rebar they created a shower of sparks.

The cuts need to precisely match the windows being custom-made for the openings, Futrell said.

"They have to cut those walls very clean, very smooth and very true," Futrell said. "It's work that's got to be done right, and they're doing it right."

One engineering challenge was how to safely remove the 20,000-pound slabs from the walls. Before the final cuts were made, workers threaded a strap through holes in the panels and a crane lifted the strap upward to relieve the tension. Once the panels were cut free, workers pushed them out and the crane lowered them to the ground, where they are being broken up and recycled.

Six additional panels on the south side are being removed next week. Work will then switch to the more north side of the building, which faces Old Courthouse Square, but that progress won't be as visible because of the scaffolding and black fabric covering it, Tomasi said. To avoid blocking traffic on Third Street with a large crane, the plan is to pull the panels inward and crunch them up with a machine. A total of 19 panels will be removed from the north wall.

In addition to TLCD, other tenants include Luther Burbank Savings, which will occupy the fourth and fifth floors, and the California Wine Museum, which plans to be located in the basement.

A group of architects from TLCD on Wednesday visited their future work space on the third floor. Someone had sketched pink chalk lines on the dusty concrete floor to show where interior walls will be located. Discussions are underway about how to reuse material salvaged from the site to decorate their space, including antiquated telephone switching equipment and gabion walls built of crushed concrete, Tomasi said.

"We've got a lot of ideas."

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or at kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @citybeater.