Illinois town considers demolition of its tallest building

The mayor of Danville, Illinois, has made public statements favoring the demolition of the 12-story Bresee Tower, the tallest building in that eastern Illinois city of about 30,000 people.

According to a Jan. 27 article on the website of the Danville-based Commercial-News, the city’s mayor Rickey Williams Jr. indicated in a city council meeting on Jan. 26 that the owners of the building have no current revenue stream from the building, and seemingly none in sight. “I think that, unfortunately, the time to save that building has gone,” Williams reportedly told a city council committee.

Williams then indicated city government will likely undertake court proceedings and prepare a process to receive demolition bids for the former office building, which was built as the First National Bank Building and opened in 1918. The Bresee Tower name was introduced in the mid-1960s, when two brothers with the last name Bresee bought the office building.

The building has reportedly been vacant since 2006 and has had a series of owners, most recently a couple by the last name of Collins who changed the name of the building to Collins Tower. The building has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, but portions of it have at times fallen onto nearby streets and sidewalks.

A previous demolition estimating process by the city of Danville yielded a $2.5 million estimate to tear down Bresee Tower and an adjacent annex, with asbestos abatement cited as a considerable obligation, according to the Commercial-News.