Information > In The News > The Greensboro News & Record
Torn apart at the seams
Donald W. Patterson, Staff Writer
taken from The Greensboro News & Record, February 2, 2005
GREENSBORO -- Donnie Goldston, the man who used to keep the Burlington Industries headquarters running, now has a different job.
He's helping tear down the Gate City icon.
And it's tearing him up, too.
"When you see things like this happen, it doesn't make you happy," Goldston said Tuesday. "You can't be happy when it is a part of you."
Goldston, 56, went to work at the distinctive glass-and-steel structure on West Friendly Avenue soon after it opened in 1971. He spent much of his time there as plant engineer.
Now, he's working as a consultant for D.H. Griffin Wrecking Co., the Greensboro company hired to demolish the building.
A two-story section -- from which asbestos and ceilings had already been removed -- began to come down Monday.
"They're taking it apart piece by piece," said Coolidge Porterfield, president of Starmount Company, which owns the building. "I'd say we are six months away from having it down."
The six-story high-rise section will come down later, once asbestos has been removed.
When it opened, the building turned heads because of its unusual exposed steel structure, its modernistic interior and its manicured grounds.
"I've never seen one like it," Peter Tourtellot, managing director of the ALTMA Group, a national turnaround firm with an office in Greensboro, said of the building. "That's not to say there isn't one. It's a big world."
Architects say the building was designed in a style similar to the John Hancock Building in Chicago -- just not as tall.
Some visitors and employees found the building's interior -- with its wide halls and high ceilings -- cold and uninviting. But not Goldston, who gives Griffin superintendents advice on how the headquarters operated.
"It was a building before its time," Goldston said. "Burlington always went with top quality."
The building contained a TV studio, company store, a showroom for company products, photo lab, training centers and a car wash for the company limo.
"Burlington at its peak was a going place," Goldston said. "You would have never thought that it would have ended up (like this)."
Some say the demise of the rambling, 452,000-square-foot building parallels what has happened to Burlington Industries in particular and the U.S. textile industry in general.
During the early 1980s, Burlington billed itself the largest textile company in the world, once operating 149 plants and employing 80,000 people.
At one time, about 1,600 of them worked at the headquarters at 3330 W. Friendly Ave.
When the company vacated the building in November 2004, only 400 still worked there.
The company is now a part of International Textile Group, which is owned by New York financier Wilbur Ross.
Ross bought Burlington and Cone Mills, another Greensboro-based textile operation, out of bankruptcy and merged them last March.
After the merger, Burlington and Cone moved to office space in the Green Valley office park and the former headquarters became expendable.
Once the building comes down, Starmount plans to turn the 34-acre site, which borders Friendly Center, into a 325,000-square-foot complex called the Shops at Friendly.
Porterfield, the Starmount official, called the building "inefficient," noting that it was suitable only for a corporate headquarters.
A number of preservationists and architects wanted to see the building saved.
"What is being lost is a trophy building from Greensboro's past, from its textile history," said Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro. "It was one of the premier office buildings in the state. That chapter of Greensboro is being erased."
Briggs and others wanted to see the exterior saved and the interior refitted to make it more useful.
"That would have been the perfect scenario," Briggs said. "Save the best of the past for the future."
Some parts of the property will survive. The company sign in front of the building has been uprooted and will be put to some undecided use in the future, and a massive, modern art sculpture in an enclosed courtyard will be kept and may be incorporated in Starmount's new development.
Former employees have asked Goldston to get them a piece of brick or a block as a souvenir. He said he might keep a piece of the steel for himself.
Watching the building come down reminds Goldston of a scene from "Jurassic Park."
"It looks just like dinosaurs with big mouths just chunking away with the steel," he said, referring to the big equipment used in the demolition. "It attacks that steel like it was toothpicks."
Asked why he wanted to be a part of the demolition, he said: "I felt like that would be part of the healing process," watching the building slowly disappear.
"People ask me, 'how are you dealing with it,' " he said. " ...(I say) 'Change will happen and life goes on.' "