Hach building demolished

CEDAR RAPIDS - Preservationists were on hand Monday morning to mourn as demolition crews quickly took down the 113-year-old, flood-damaged P. Hach Bottling House building in the New Bohemia district.

'I just had to see it through,” Beth DeBoom, president of Save CR Heritage, said at the demolition site. 'I had to be here at the end.”

Jon Jelinek, a New Bohemia business owner who has saved an assortment of flood-damaged historic buildings, said the property owners, Leon 'Tunnie” and Diane Melsha, had been offered about $80,000 to sell the tavern building, but chose demolition instead.

The Melshas' son, Jeff, who runs the Little Bohemia bar and restaurant just up the street, has said the cost to renovate became too great to save the building, at 1318 Second St. SE.

Some Hach family members also were at the demolition site on Monday.

Robert Hach Jr. of Ely, who had been working to buy the flood-damaged building in 2009 when the Melshas purchased it instead, has estimated it would have cost $1 million or more to the renovate the building, an amount that didn't make it financially sensible to keep the building in place, he has said.

Hach's cousin, Allan Hach of Cedar Rapids, on Monday agreed, saying the damage to the wood building from the 2008 flood and the inattention to the building in the intervening six years made renovation impractical.

'I shed a tear for the place,” Allan Hach said Monday. 'But what I noticed when they tore it down, there was not a decent piece of lumber in the whole place laying there. Especially, the base floor. The cross members and the floor boards were all just rotted out.”

Rick Stickle of Cedar Rapids, whose company demolished the building, removed the original Hach nameplate from the building on Saturday and is holding it by arrangement for another family member, Kenneth Hach of Alta, Stickle said.

DeBoom said the entire view into New Bohemia has changed with the removal of the Hach building.

'Something will be built there someday, but there's no way you can reconstruct what was lost today,” she said.

Both she and Allan Hach received bricks from the Hach building, which the Hach family sold some 70 years ago.

Allan Hach said he also has plenty of family photographs from the bar reaching back to 1905, and he said he has a painting by a Czech-American painter that will keep the Hach family connection to the building alive.

As he told it, his grandfather took money out of the bar's cash drawer many, many years ago to buy a raffle ticket over the objections of his wife. He won the painting in the raffle, and then hung the painting on a wall at home to irritate his wife. Allan Hach subsequently had it on one of his walls until he donated it to the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in the last few years.

'It's a direct connection to the tavern,” Allan Hach said.

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