Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 21, 1991 TAG: 9104180623
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
At each stop, Mary Gilbert uses a rope to drop the metal shield that bridges the step-wide gap between the lift and the building. Then, in a series of fluid movements, she raises the shield, pulls down the plyboard front and starts the cage upward again.
Gilbert makes the trip up or down the building every 15 minutes or so of her workday, which often stretches beyond 8 hours.
As the $40 million office building and parking garage in downtown Roanoke has progressed, so has the reach of her elevator. For some time now, the last stop has been the top office level, the 21st floor. It's really the 20th because there's no 13th floor. From this level, access to the tiptop, the pyramid that will house some of the building's heating and cooling system, will be by steps.
Dominion Tower is 368 feet and 6 inches tall, including its 49-foot spire. It is Roanoke's tallest office building.
It also is the first phase in an ambitious development plan that calls for a pedestrian bridge across the Norfolk Southern Railway tracks linking downtown to a Hotel Roanoke Conference Center and a proposed trade center.
Nearly a year has passed since groundbreaking last May. At that ceremony, David Caudill, Dominion Bankshares Corp. president, hailed the project as "the first step of what will be the greatest expansion downtown has witnessed since the railroad came to town."
Dominion Bankshares will be the building's main tenant and its namesake, although the original proposal from Charlotte developer Henry Faison was for a high-rise that would house both Dominion and Norfolk Southern offices.
The bank was outgrowing its 1975 building on Jefferson Street and the current NS offices are on the site proposed for the trade center, so Faison proposed a single solution to the two companies.
After much negotiation, the railroad went its own way, and the pristine white cranes for a separate 11-story NS building punctuate the skyline on Franklin Road three blocks from the Dominion project.
There's a good view of the NS project from the Dominion Tower, which is finally looking down on everything nearby. Like Caudill said at the groundbreaking, "Dominion has raised the skyline."
The construction project also has made sidewalk superintendents out of executives who live in corner offices of Dominion Bankshares' nearby 15-story headquarters.
Bob Schneider, project manager for the contractor, F.N. Thompson Co. of Charlotte, even knows which office belongs to which banker.
"I think those guys are in Fitzpatrick's office," Schneider said while standing on the tower's 16th floor and looking at people in the bank building pointing toward it.
"We're fascinated with the cranes," said Beverly Fitzpatrick, Dominion's vice president for economic development and legislative affairs.
Fitzpatrick even has a set of Dominion Tower plans. He and his son, B.P., built a scale model of the bank's current building and had planned to build a model of the new one.
"I'm not sure we going to attempt the tower because it has a lot of curves and indentations," Fitzpatrick said.
Dominion Bank has leased floors 16 through 21, or 85,000 of the tower's total 205,000 square feet of office space. Other anchor tenants are two law firms - Woods, Rogers & Hazlegrove, with 50,600 square feet, and Moss & Rocovich, leasing 8,508 square feet.
About 25 percent of the space is still available.
Leasing the building is the responsibility of Faison Associates.
Schneider, 37, is a slow-talking Floridian and a graduate of the University of Florida's college of building construction. Even though he spent time on jobs in Houston during the Texas building boom of the early 1980s, Roanoke's Dominion Tower is his largest project.
As project manager, he selected the subcontractors, wrote contracts and purchase orders, and set up the company's bank accounts - at Dominion. He also schedules the flow of the construction work to bring the project in, as scheduled, on Dec. 19.
No. 2 on the tower is Carl Secrest, 55, a tall, bearded man who wears a two-way radio as if it were an extension of his right hand. His job as field superintendent is to monitor and coordinate the 20-plus subcontractors working on the building.
Since construction began, Secrest said crews have worked 332 days, including many nights and most Saturdays. The majority of that time, Secrest also worked.
He gets to the job about 6:15 each morning, parking his big Harley inside his office in the former Uptown Florist building across from the construction site.
From the time he arrives, the two-way radio and the telephone get busy, as does the traffic in and out of the office as subcontractors get their crews started.
It's heavy coffee-drinking time. The office crew and foremen go through about 10 pots a day. Some of it is used to wash down homemade tacos brought in by some of the Hispanic laborers on the project.
The Hispanic workers, who were part of the crew for Dee Shoring Inc. of Richmond, have been a subject of controvery. Roanoke Valley union leaders claim they displaced local workers, and when one on the Hispanics was killed last October in a fall from the building, the focus on out-of-town labor intensified.
Schneider is defensive about the union complaints, although he said he has heard similar complaints on other jobs. F.N. Thompson is a non-union company, and there is only one union subcontractor on the project.
There are about 135 people on the tower project, including 20 on the F.N. Thompson payroll. Schneider said 75 percent of the workers have local addresses.
He said the fatality was a "harsh experience" for him because it was only the second time anyone had been killed on a job he was involved in.
No safety violations were found in an investigation of the worker's death, but Schneider said the news media "harped" on the accident and then underplayed the finding of no violations.
Other accidents at the site have been minor, he said.
Safety meetings are held on Monday mornings for everyone connected with the project. That's because everybody comes in on Mondays with a "bad case of the dumb-a--," Secrest said.
Safety also is one of the topics at the regular Tuesday meetings of subcontractors.
"Now that we've topped out [poured the last concrete], people think the dangerous part is over," Schneider told the group on a recent Tuesday. "They get lackadaisacal. I need everyone's help. If you take down a rail, you've got to put it back up. If I catch someone up there welding and no one on the ground watching, I'm gonna get upset. It's gonna cost you money." The welder watcher is there to watch for fires.
The Tuesday meetings are opportunities for subcontractors to talk about progress or problems and for Schneider to update everyone.
"Dee Shoring finally got done. Now we've got to get them off the site," Schneider told the April 9 gathering.
The final concrete was poured April 5, and everyone was eager to move on. The elevator subcontractor was ready to install equipment, but couldn't until Dee Shoring finished its cleanup.
Schneider runs the meetings using detailed minutes taken by Bill Woodson, an architect who is assistant project manager.
Each participant gets a copy. "That way everyone knows what is expected," Schneider said.
By the end of April, he tells the group, the project's short crane will be taken down. The remaining 380-foot-tall crane will be used to "fly" the 33-by-60 foot arched roof systems to the top of the building from the parking garage floor where they are being assembled.
Throughout the meeting, Schneider keeps everyone focused on his schedule.
"You know my critical path," Schneider reminded Anne Fowlkes. Fowlkes is project coordinator for Weeks-Bell of Greensboro, which is supplying the 1,300-plus pieces of precast concrete used in the building.
The critical path has to do with which panels are needed when and he wants to know if they are ready.
The precast panels each weigh an average of 10,000 pounds, and require a lot of peoples' attention before they get onto the building. But little things, like brooms, also become issues on big projects.
Before a meeting began, safety officer Stephanie Slough was rushing to put the handle on a new broom for the cleanup workers.
Cleaning up is a major concern and expense on a construction site, Schneider said. Four or five people are assigned to it full time. By early April, a private contractor had hauled away about 250 dump-truck loads of debris and that didn't include wood given away for firewood.
Workers probably will go through a couple of hundred brooms before the building's built.
"All bought locally," Schneider said.
Even though contractors are from out of town, the Dominion Tower is having an impact on the Roanoke Valley economy, participants said.
The Dominion contract is one of the top five jobs Concrete Ready Mixed Corp. of Roanoke has ever gotten, according to president Robert Lindsay. The first order of concrete was for more than $1 million, he said.
Fabricated Metals Industries Inc. has a $600,000 contract to furnish and install the steel in the building; Overhead Door, a $20,750 contract for doors and dock equipment.
Also, F.N. Thompson is renting eight to 10 apartments at Pebble Creek and The Summit, and out-of-town subcontractors have workers also renting quarters.
The City Market restaurants and the Food Court in the Market Building, across Salem Avenue from the construction site, benefit every workday.
Schneider said the average worker on the job makes about $25,000 a year, and he knows the workers spend money in Roanoke because about 95 percent of them eat lunch out.
Schneider's job on the Dominion Tower runs until the completion date, until the final interior touches are put on the building. By then, he will have overseen a 472,063 square-foot project that includes first-floor office and retail quarters and a 702-space parking garage on floors two through seven.
Schneider enjoys standing on his building's top floor with its panoramic view of the mountains and being able to point to the Mason Cove area where he lives. He moved his family to Roanoke County from Wilmington, N.C.
"The Roanoke Valley is beautiful," he said.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB