Well, the video we’ve all been waiting for, for better or worse.

Demolition of JC Penney has indeed started, and we see here the crew starting at the end closest to 51 that originally housed the Auto Center, later to become the catalog desk and hair salon. A larger excavator has been brought in to bring the mall down, and we can see the extent of work that has been going on inside the mall the last few months as the interior has been stripped down to the bare structure. We typically see most drywall and interior furnishings still intact when the excavators go to work on the structure with other mall teardowns, but Neiswonger has taken a different approach. While their approach is more labor intensive, taking more care to disassemble the mall in stages allows for better material recovery, faster cleanup, and less air pollution from demolition (very little airborne drywall dust and insulation).

It remains to be seen how far demolition will progress with the interior of the eastern half of the mall still being stripped. I’m anticipating that demolition will stop after Penneys is gone for a bit until the interior crew has finished with the mall, allowing for easier removal of the massive pile of debris currently occupying the mall’s main concourse. Of course, all of my previous timeline estimates have been wrong, and demolition could very well continue onto the very first part of the mall that was erected back in 1978.