It sounds so much nicer than "we demolished the rest of the old facade" don't you think? (Here's a shot of the appearance before the '60's facade came off - you can always tell where you are by looking at the Hub sign out front). 
Works starts today rebuilding the original street-front facades (1940's slightly modified on the left and 1897 as close as we can get it on the right - stucco on the left gets cleaned and repainted tan, and brick on the right gets stripped to original red color) today, so yesterday was demolition day for the rest of the old facades. 
(I included this picture of the boys the day the aluminum facade came off in October to show what was there before). On the 111 side what was left was the 1940's tile, and we unfortunately discovered that the entire backing of the tile up high around the old sign was rotted, as you can tell in the picture, so we had to take it out 
(George looks way too happy about this). We'll retile to match the original and put up a new sign - the original neon goes up on display on the inside.
On the right side, the original facade was replaced at some point with a weird mixture of corrugated metal and Roman brick, so it was a pleasure getting that side down to expose the original cast iron header and pilasters.
In the spirit of recycling, the temporary walls shown inside (which are nine feet high - the scale of the pictures is deceiving) are made from corugated aluminum that used to be Jamie's carport before we got married. It'll stay in place till the new storefronts are framed up and the window openings covered temporarily with plywood - hopefully by the end of Tuesday. Incidentally, you can see the inset for the front doors by looking at where the metal ceiling is cut away - as we inexplicably have the original front doors (again, they were laying on top of the roof joists when we started taking the later additions down - we had no idea they still existed), we're rebuilding the entire facade around them. Again, here's our target picture, which we believe was taken in 1908 but documents the 1897 appearance.
The best news is that this week will probably be the end of the dumpster - demolition is now officially complete.
