Old Mall bricks being stacked on pallets to be sold at the City’s monthly surplus property sale.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Update 2/5/09: The City has made a decision on what to charge for the bricks at the surplus property sale tomorrow: $5 each and you can buy up to 10 bricks.

“Only a small portion of the bricks will be sold in this manner,” says Luchard. “The majority of the bricks will be sold either by Invitation for Bids or by online auction.”

Luchard also says that one local citizen has expressed interest in buying 10,000 bricks. 

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City planners have finally made a definitive decision about what to do with the Downtown Mall’s old bricks. While most of the damaged ones will be ground up and used for trail cover, says planning chief Jim Tolbert, thousands of intact bricks will be sold to the public online and at the City’s monthly surplus property sale, which is held on the first Friday of every month from 12pm to 3pm.

According to Jennifer Luchard, the City’s procurement manager, demo crews have been stacking intact bricks on pallets and will haul them down to the City Yard on 4th Street tomorrow. Luchard says they hope to have some ‘unclean’ bricks–bricks with mortar still attached to them–available for sale this Friday, with pallets of clean bricks available beginning next month.

Luchard says there has been considerable interest in the bricks, from individuals who simply want a single brick, to contractors wanting several pallets to use for their projects. Luchard says they are still debating how much to charge for the bricks.

“We want to try to sell them in small amounts, for people who just want a piece of history or add to their patios, “says Luchard, “but we’re also going to sell them in larger lots.”

The larger lots, says Luchard, will be sold on the government surplus auction website Govdeals.com. There is also a plan to invite bids on sections of the brick that have yet to be removed, selling the spoils to the highest bidder.

Luchard says the city has already salvaged an estimated 8,000 clean bricks, but did not have a count yet on the unclean bricks, many of which have yet to be removed. There are an estimated 375,000 bricks on the Mall, and as city planners said before the project began, 80 percent of them appeared to be in good shape.

Indeed, some felt that the bricks were in such good shape that they should have been re-used for the $7.5 million project itself, including City Councilor Satyendra Huja.

“First, we need to use the bricks we have,” Huja said last June, before eventually approving the project, “clean them up, and reuse them. This will save money and preserve the character of the Mall.”

At a packed public meeting on the project last July (Tolbert said it was the biggest crowd that had ever assembled at City Space), most felt that the exiting Mall bricks simply needed to be repaired.

The biggest applause of the evening, along with a few hoots and hollers, went to City resident David RePass, who questioned the basic rationale of the project.

“We have been told that the Mall renovation, quote, ‘will preserve the original design.’ Well, that’s not true,” he said. “A fundamental part of the design has been discarded: the mortar between the bricks.”

The new bricks are being laid in sand, without mortar, which city planners have said will make them easier to install and maintain.

“It scares me that you didn’t think of reusing the existing brick,” said another speaker at the July public meeting, his voice rising in indignation as he pointed out that most of the bricks, according to the city’s own planners, were in good condition.

As Tolbert predicted, many of the old bricks are being destroyed or damaged by the removal process, which, in the interest of keeping the 5-month project on schedule, has involved scraping them up with a small back hoe and piling them into a dump truck with a front-end loader. But now that the decision to sell them has been made, crews appear to be handling their removal more carefully.