Hamburger

There were many memorable projects during my years of working in Los Angeles and not all of them were filled with the thrill of doing something dangerous. Sometimes they were funny…

One of those times was when we were involved in the remodeling of the May Company Department Store in downtown Los Angeles. This store was located in what was called the Hamburger's Building. (Nothing to do with beef sandwiches…) Hamburger was the surname of the man who had built the structure in the early 1900’s. It was a 7 story building, with a steel framework and wooden plank floors. The exterior walls were of stone and terra cotta, while the interior walls were made of plaster. And since the building was already 60+ years old, it had been remodeled many times.

One day, we were working on the ground floor and back in a stock room area. We were building some new walls around the elevator and to do that work, we had to stop the elevator from being used that morning and open the doors to the hoist way.
Now elevator hoist ways are probably the very last things to be cleaned in a building and this one was no exception. A very thin film of oil from the elevator cables covered the walls of the shaft and over the years, a lacy covering of dust had attached itself to the walls. Imagine a shaft that was about twelve feet square and about one hundred feet tall, all covered with “dust bunnies”.

I remember standing near the open door to the hoist way when our foreman decided to do a little bit of welding. He struck the “stinger” to a piece of steel and the sparks flew. And some of those sparks rolled across the floor and into the shaft. There was a loud “whoosh!” A blaze of light followed as the hoist way erupted into flames. Then, just as suddenly, the flames were gone and only a small haze of smoke remained. We had just cleaned the entire elevator shaft of its 60 year accumulation of dirt and dust and had done it in less than a minute!

We waited expectantly for someone, anyone…to come running to see what had happened. But nothing happened. No sirens, no panic…apparently it had happened so fast that no one besides ourselves had any idea that we had just come within seconds of burning down a historic building. And we certainly didn’t tell anyone!