Center Wheeling Parking Garage Demolition Completed Early
Eric Ayres Trending
WHEELING -- Demolition of the Center Wheeling Parking Structure has been completed several months ahead of schedule, and the adjacent section of Chapline Street reopened to traffic for the first time since closing in March because of the nearby demolition work.
Originally scheduled for completion around Memorial Day next year, the project to dismantle the former parking structure went very smoothly, city officials said. The structure not only served as the primary parking location for employees, patients and visitors to the former Ohio Valley Medical Center complex for decades, it also housed the former Wheeling Fire Department Headquarters on the lower level of the Market Street side of the building since 1978.
This week, Wheeling City Manager Robert Herron reported to city council members that Reclaim Company LLC of Fairmont, W.Va., was ahead of schedule on the project. The city awarded a $1,638,000 contract to Reclaim in November of 2023, and a piece-by-piece dismantling of the parking garage began last spring.
"The Center Wheeling Parking Structure demolition project has been deemed substantially complete," Herron reported this week, noting that the wide-open space has truly changed the landscape of this part of Center Wheeling. "If you have an opportunity to go down to that site, it's a lot larger than what we had anticipated."
Adding to the drastically transformed skyline of the Center Wheeling neighborhood is the property next door where the OVMC buildings have also been removed as part of a multimillion-dollar demolition project. WVU Medicine worked with the city and the Ohio County Commissioners to help clear several vacant buildings from the former hospital complex to make room for a planned regional, state-of-the-art cancer center.
Demolition work at the OVMC site has taken place simultaneously with the city's parking garage dismantling over the past several months. WVU Medicine hired F.R. Beinke Wrecking Inc. of New Jersey, awarding them a $6.8 million contract to spearhead that massive demolition project at the OVMC site. Today, the buildings have been reduced to piles of rubble, and teams of cranes continue working to remove the remnants of the sprawling former hospital complex.
The dismantling of the Center Wheeling Parking Garage was scheduled to take place in phases through the end of the year and well into next spring. A portion of Chapline Street in Center Wheeling between 20th and 22nd streets directly in between the two major demolition projects had been closed since March, but with the OVMC buildings now down and the garage demo completed ahead of schedule, the road was prepared to reopen this week. In fact, the road opening occurred slightly ahead of schedule this week, as well.
"That project is completed for the most part," Herron said of the parking garage demolition. "There's a little bit of storm sewer work that needs to be done on Market Street, but the site itself -- the contractor is beginning demobilization of the site."
Herron reported to city council that Chapline Street was scheduled to be reopened by Friday afternoon. However, the fencing was removed and the road was reopened Wednesday.
This week, crews working for Reclaim removed the last of their equipment and the portable toilets from the construction site. With the fencing removed and the street reopened, motorists on Wednesday were able to pass through this section of Chapline Street where the skywalk stood for decades connecting the former parking garage with OVMC's West Tower.
City leaders this week were pleasantly surprised by how far ahead of schedule the parking garage demolition was.
"That project was under contract to be completed by the end of May 2025, so it is well ahead of schedule and right on budget, so we're very pleased with that," Herron said.
As part of the parking garage demo, Reclaim crews were to take slabs of concrete from the site to city owned property on 19th Street, where the slabs were crushed and reused as fill material. Nearly 10,000 cubic yards of crushed concrete from the parking garage was expected to be used to elevate the 19th Street property out of the floodplain near Wheeling Creek. The city is expected to market the former industrial site at 19th Street for future commercial development.
The new Wheeling Police Headquarters is located on Chapline Street in Center Wheeling inside a renovated building that once was part of the OVMC complex. Work on the $8.6 million renovation of the police headquarters building already began when a determination was made by city leaders that the adjacent parking garage needed to be razed.
Many months prior to that, the garage had been closed to public parking because of structural concerns, which reportedly became worse during the construction of the police headquarters.
A new sally port that was part of the original plans for the police headquarters was put on hold because of the demolition. That sally port is still expected to be added to the police building in the near future. City leaders will have to decide what to do with the rest of the property where the garage once stood.
"It has tremendous potential as a development site," Herron said. "There could be a combination of several uses."