Demolition work has begun at the old Suffolk Life building on Route 58 to make way for a new Lowe’s Home Improvement Center on the site.
Observant passersby have noticed a chain-link fence was erected on the property earlier this week to secure the site for asbestos removal work now underway by Boyle Services of Huntington. Boyle Services specializes in asbestos and lead paint removal. It has been contracted by Lowe’s to remove asbestos from the 100,000-square-foot building, built in the early 1960s for discount retailer Billy Blake’s.
Once the asbestos is safely removed from the site, general demolition work can begin, said site manager David Boyle. The entire structure will be demolished and carted away, he said.
Inside the chain-link fence surrounding the former newspaper plant, Boyle Services has set up a temporary office outside the iconic blue-and-white sprawling building. Inside the office, six-inch-thick job specification books were lined up on plastic folding tables Thursday, and supplies and safety equipment lined the plywood walls. The company builds a temporary structure to house a small command center at every work site, Boyle said.
Facilities such as emergency eye-flushing equipment and two wash-down trailers are lined up in the old Sufolk Life parking lot, alongside roll-off containers waiting to receive demolition debris. It’s all standard operating procedure for asbestos removal companies, Boyle said.
Lowe’s plans to build a 100,000-square-foot building of its own on the site, Boyle said.
A site plan for the new store was approved by the Riverhead Planning Board in June. Construction is expected to take about a year.
Suffolk Life Newspapers, founded by Riverhead native David Willmott, operated at the Route 58 location from 1985 to 2008, when the newspaper went out of business. Willmott, who started up the first of his free weekly papers in the 1960s, cited his declining health and lagging capital in a June 2008 goodbye note to readers, signed with his signature “And why not?” Willmott died in August 2009 at the age of 71.
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