This is a slow motion video of yesterday’s demolition of the Drexel smokestack in Philly, set to “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap. It is sad. Bye bye, factory economy, hello, glass tower economy (affordable office space now available).
[via Boing Boing]
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Heh, do we have a Drexel alum at the Consumerist? See you in hell, Shaft!
@ircu: Yes we do… glad to see the damn thing gone.
I like how you can see the sound wave hit the glass building right after the Shaft hits the ground.
The glass building is the Comcast Center building, world headquarters of one of Consumerist’s favorite corporations!
@AnxiousDemographic: Actually it’s not. Comcast Center can be seen in center city way off in the background but that close building is the Cira Center – [en.wikipedia.org]
Actually, the glas building in the video is the Cira Centre, adjacent to 30th Street Station.
The Comcast Center building is downtown and is significantly taller (but not as cool looking, IMO).
@DGberg:
Wow! I listen to this podcast everyday by Preston and Steve. I always hear them talking about these buildings.
Thanks for the info!
@If I kill myself, can I be in a commercial too?: Awesome — I missed that the first time. Thanks for pointing it out.
@If I kill myself, can I be in a commercial too?: I’m not sure if it’s the sound wave or a reflection in the glass of the shaft hitting the ground and bricks flying up. Either way, it’s pretty cool.
@H3ion: the Cira Center is one of the coolest buildings in the world imo – it has LEDs on two sides that light up for different events, like the other day it had the Phillies P on it, it had the Penn P during our homecoming, and it has the Drexel D during theirs. It also does color light displays during certain times of the year – christmas the lights all do shimmering red and green et cetera.
@SpruceStreetPhil: Wait wait wait…. Drexel has a homecoming? I went there for five years and I don’t remember ever having a homecoming.
They totally ripped Jason DeRulo’s song.
@BeyondtheTech: I just vomited in my mouth a bit.
Mmmm.. lasagna.
@BeyondtheTech: That reminds me – that first Lord of the Rings movie? Where the old wizard man sacrifices himself so his friends can escape? TOTAL ripoff of Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars man! Yeesh.
I thought that was going to be more epic. :-/
@idip: I’ve gotta say, I think that if they had used properly recorded music, it would have helped immensely.
Quick, someone start a thread of V1AGRA and C1AL1S jokes!
@Xerloq, we are all made of stars.: this is why you should seek a doctor after those 4 hours…
This article keeps talking about this as an eyesore, but I always thought it was sort of a pretty sight from the train in a sort of Battersea Power station kind of way.
[media.www.thetriangle.org]
I hope that they were expecting it to topple like that, instead of falling in on itself.
@Oranges w/ Cheese has 2 cats! ahahaha.: Yeah – first time I’ve ever seen anything allowed to fall over like that instead of set up to implode down onto itself…must be a lot of open real estate up there.
@Oranges w/ Cheese has 2 cats! ahahaha.: I’m pretty sure they meant for it to fall that way. A smokestack like that is a more-or-less solid cylinder of masonry. You can’t implode it because (apart from a relatively narrow tube in the center) there’s no voids for material from above to collapse into. So instead you set up the charge to blast a wedge of sorts into the side you want the stack to fall towards.
“Frodo!!!!”
That was cool to see the glass shake.
To steal another line, The Shaft will be with you, Always…
Does consumerist have Drexel grads on the staff that I’m unaware of? I’m a Drexel grad myself and am annoyed I forgot to get up to go see the shaft demolished, but I just don’t understand the tie to Consumerist.
@bonzombiekitty: I applied to Drexel for grad school because there was no application fee. That counts?
I’m just glad to see someone repping this song, instead of that inane sampling that’s playing on the radio constantly. I <3 Imogen Heap…
@katstermonster: Better start practicing the ball curling.
Ahhh, the old shaft. How I loathe the, but first, a Haiku
Drexel Shaft falls down
Beautiful dust cloud, Come FORTH!
Future is now bright
When did people start referring to the chimney as “the shaft”. I was at Drexel in the late 80s, and as I remember it “the shaft” was a sculpture that was supposed to look like a flame, but really just looked like some sort of huge torture device. I don’t remember where it was – maybe in front of the gym or in the quad in front of the old library? The other irony was that the “flame” sculpture was placed at the center of a fountain.
I was also there the year they painted the grass (what grass there was) green so it would look better for graduation day.
@CarlR: They’ve been calling the chimney “the shaft” since at least when I started going to school there in 2001. Seems the switch happened sometime in the early 90s?
The fountain you are referring to got moved when they renovated the quad a few years ago. The fountain is now in front of North Hall.
@CarlR: Yep- I thought it was the Flame of Knowledge, aka the Greek Bubble Generator, in the quad.
@CarlR:
I graduated in mid 1980s. I could see this chimney from my dorm. We never had a name for it other than the chimney. The shaft was always the fountain in the quad–the same fountain that somebody added dish detergent to one spring. Bubbles floated over the entire campus. One Christmas someone added cutout snow flakes. Festive!
I also remember the rainy night when the first Apple Macintosh computers were unloaded at the armory. Drexel was the first university to require its students to have a “microcomputer.” The incoming freshman class was required to buy Macintoshes through the school. I didn’t know what a Macintosh was, but I wanted one.
Any one else totally think of Half-Life 2, you know, when you’re on the swamp boat going through City 17′s canals?
I don’t know if I’m happy or sad that the shaft is gone. It was the gave everyone a physical reminder of the Drexel Shaft we all had to deal with.
;_;
Wow. That was some of the worst music I’ve heard in a long time. Totally ruined the video.
Corrections:
The building (and shaft) in question is on land owned by the railroad and has no association with Drexel.
It hasn’t been in use in decades.
They’re using the land for a parking lot.
To clarify, the shaft was the chimney for a disused Pennsylvania Railroad power plant. It wasn’t part of Drexel University, wasn’t on Drexel property, and didn’t have anything to do with the factory vs. glass tower economy.
It was taken down as part of a series of power infrastructure improvements on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line, for which Amtrak got some $25 million in federal stimulus money.
I was at Drexel in the 80s, and always thought the Shaft was mythical. I didn’t realize that that stupid flame thing was our official representaiton of the Shaft.
I was in the first class to get a Macintosh, though- still have it- with its powerful 128K ram and 440K floppy drive, and the Drexel “D” underneath the screen.
My friend shot this. In case you were wondering, he used a Sony EX-1 XDCAM, get it to 1080p 60/24 fps.
You think this is cool, you should see the rest of his work.
[www.youtube.com]
Ok, Way off subject, but that has to be the BEST High Quality Video I have EVER seen on Youtube…
@If I kill myself, can I be in a commercial too?: That is pretty cool.
@savvy999:
The Cira center is actually pretty far from the smoke stack–the long focal length used to shoot this compresses the perspective.
It would be a nice fail, though.
@Oranges w/ Cheese has 2 cats! ahahaha.:
+1
Is it really intensional?
@nybiker: having a tower that big implode on itself and fall on its own footprint would involve a whole lot more explosives, be trickier and less-safe to set up and execute and be WAY more expensive. They weakened the tower on the side it was supposed to fall, planted some explosives and det cord in the remaining bit, and boom! Especially since they had all that room for the tower to fall, it wouldn’t have been cost effective to demo it in place.
@gStein_has joined the star bandwagon: The plant is probably packed with asbestos and other nasties that make an enormous dust cloud ill-advised.