Macon Chamber of Commerce office meets wrecking ball, but doesn’t go down without a fight

For almost half a century, the boxy Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce building plunked down at the western edge of the Macon Coliseum parking lot sat dwarfed by the massive arena it faced.

The building, one of the city’s most proximate structures to Interstate 16 at the Carl Vinson Bridge over the Ocmulgee River, may have to some seemed an architectural afterthought. But it was not.

The Chamber office, drawn up in the early 1970s by renowned local architect Eugene C. Dunwody and built in 1974 for about $500,000, was at the time seen as a commercial centerpiece, a hood ornament for a city on the come. There was a gleaming Hilton hotel right across the river, a new mall was in the works. The Chamber’s own task force was at the time a major player laying groundwork for a medical school at Mercer University.

“Macon More in ’74” was the Chamber’s annual theme.

Its aims that year, according to newspaper clippings, included implementing within the year “a single government for Macon and Bibb County.” Meanwhile, downtown parking was scarce. The local industrial authority proposed a monorail system to ferry people from the Coliseum parking lot to “an enclosed mall” on Third Street. (County commissioners torpedoed the plan.)

Over the years, the two-story Chamber building — created in the squared-off, ordered image of its neighbor, the Coliseum — housed a number of civic entities in offices that ringed a twin-staired atrium. Early this year, though, Chamber officials vacated the place and moved to fresh digs on Poplar Street.

One might assume that in a city known for preserving its antiquities — which the Chamber building was not quite — the building would find a new tenant or some other lease on life. But the cost of fixing it up was deemed impractical.

On Wednesday morning, the structure met its demise in the form of a Caterpillar 320F excavator, more or less a tank with a monster claw jutting from its nose.

Before the demolition began, at a small gathering of local officials, Gene Dunwody Jr., son the of the building’s architect, said it was “a bittersweet day.”

“Tearing down buildings is something that I’m not super in favor of,” he said. “But this building has served its purpose and it’s had a great run. Maybe it shouldn’t have gone here in the first place, but if you think about the ’70s, this was a big urban-renewal project and it was next to the interstate.”

He recalled tagging along with his father as a child when the “solid” office was under construction, seeing its reinforced-concrete bones set in place.

“It’ll be fun to watch this thing come down because it’s put up like an Erector Set,” Dunwody said. “And so it ought to probably just flop.”

But flop it did not.

The building, stripped to its skeleton, fended off hours of body blows from the excavator.

Its rebar-stiffened columns stood pat, every bit a match for the modern-day machinery brought in to fell them and, for the time being, make way for more parking at the Coliseum and for a nearby hospital’s workers.

One onlooker, watching as the excavator whammed away, at times barely denting the support columns, remarked that the unbudging building was built tough as “a brick ...” — well, a brick house.

“She’s not giving up,” the onlooker said.

At day’s end, roughly half the building still stood.

Demolition resumed Thursday.