One building left to be demolished in Invercargill CBD block

Sunday, 6 September 2020

Demolition of an Invercargill CBD block is nearly complete [file photo].

The last of the 43 buildings to be demolished in the Invercargill CBD block will be flattened in coming days.

Invercargill Central is demolishing most of a massive CBD block bordering four streets and in its place will be built a multi-million-dollar development including retail shops, office space and carpark.

Invercargill Central project director Geoff Cotton said the former Hannahs shop on Tay St was the last one still standing.

It would be knocked down after asbestos was removed in the next day or so.

* Government Life building coming down in CBD block

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‘’It should be gone during the week and that will be that … the demolition guys will be leaving the project.’’

It was a good milestone for the project, he said.

The Ceres demolition team had been on the job, with a few exceptions such as Covid lockdown, since late January.

The remaining buildings on the site were not owned by Invercargill Central and would not be coming down.

Invercargill Central director Scott O’Donnell, the man behind the project, said it would be great to get demolition concluded so the building work could get going.

‘’With the time we have lost we are doing really well to recover,’’ O’Donnell said.

He was now hopeful of having the new Farmers building, which would be the anchor tenant in the retail section of the block, completed and opened by early 2022.

Talks with a lot of other possible retail tenants were still at an interim stage.

‘’We have got heaps of time, if we are opening some time in 2022 for Farmers, and during 2022 for the rest, we are about two years away.

‘’The retail world’s untidy at the moment, they are all hurting, so we don’t expect too much this calendar year. We will make sure we come back next year and get things done.’’

O’Donnell said he was pleased with the public response during the past seven months of demolition.

‘’People can see progress, they can see its dead flat now, so we can get on and get some construction done.’’

He also noted the new ILT Hotel a couple of blocks away was being built at a ‘’reasonable pace’’.

Cotton said more than half of the 630 piles for the new CBD development were already in the ground and the remainder would be in by the first week of October.

A lot of the walls and beams and columns for the new CBD buildings were being made off site, so once the construction work started proper it would happen ‘’quite fast’’.

He expected the first walls to start going up about late October or early November.

‘’It’s a good time to start building, Spring.’’