Five Rose Wreckers

To a drab backwash of the '80s in downtown Minneapolis one day last week went erect, seamy-faced Mayor George E. Leach. At the corner of Fifth Street and Hennepin Avenue, clangorous with streetcar traffic, he stood up before a nostalgic crowd. Said he: "I was here when the first brick was put in and I am here now to take the first brick out." Then, with a crowbar he pried one from the fac,ade of an imposing seven-story Moorish-Victorian pile.

Thus with ceremony usually saved for a new building, Minneapolis said good-by to an old: the famed 400-room West Hotel where Jim Hill had eaten, slept and drunk while building his northwest railroad empire; where Ruby Bob Fitzsimmons once demonstrated his solar plexus punch with a bellboy for a sparring partner; where popeyed crowds had gathered, in the reaches of the spreading, pretentious lobby, to watch Booth, Mansfield, Bernhardt, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and many another pass.

After the brick-busting, the old West passed into the hands of a firm which has made more buildings disappear than all the raiding bombers of modern warfare: the sprawling Cleveland Wrecking Co.

For the five Brothers Rose, owners of Cleveland Wrecking, it was another in a series of thousands of jobs of erasing oldfashioned, tax-eating structures to make room for new buildings, parking lots, Government housing projects. Like many another well-built oldtimer, the West Hotel promised fat profits in salvage as well as a decent fee (reputedly $20,000) for demolition.

Broad-shouldered, heavy-jawed President Louis Sanders Rose was 18 when he opened his first office in 1908. In his first year he did $25,000 worth of business in salvage sales, began to spread out, reached into his own family for executive help.

Into the firm went Big Brother William, Little Brothers Mose, Sidney, John, Charles. To Mose death came in the early '20s, but the five Roses rode on, destroying for profit and progress.

After the war the Roses razed Camp Gordon in Georgia, Camp Sherman in Ohio, set up salvage yards in 14 U. S. cities, spotted executive offices in five other cities from coast to coast. String-savers on a grand scale, they also bought army goods--everything from McClellan saddles to cots and hospital equipment--opened Army-&-Navy stores to resell them. They wrecked buildings by the thousands, branched into new lumber. In 1928 they incorporated. The company was named Cleveland in honor of Father Rose's home; its technical headquarters were based in Cincinnati because it was an Ohio corporation; its home office stayed in Minneapolis because that was where Louis got his start.

Scattered from Philadelphia to San Francisco, the Brothers Rose meet only two or three times a year. Once they meet as stockholders, tot up the profits, split them five equal ways. Several times a week they meet by telephone, manage to pile up tolls of $10,000 a year in shop talk, family gossip.

Today, with seven salvage, sales and wrecking subsidiaries, Cleveland Wrecking is one of six big wrecking companies whose relative size no man can list because wreckers are closemouthed about sales and profits. This year, with wrecking contracts all over the country (examples: 800 buildings in Louisville, 550 in Cincinnati, 300 in Columbus, Ohio, 75 in Oakland, Calif.), Cleveland Wrecking is having one of the big years of its career, can well look forward to salvage coups like its saving of 6,000,000 feet of lumber from Duluth grain elevators. To keep up with their destruction, the Roses need 200 administrative employes, sometimes employ as much as $100,000 worth of equipment on a single job, including bulldozers, clam shell buckets, a two-ton steel weight swung from a boom to batter walls and floors. But peacetime wrecking technology is not subject to much change.

Chief Rose cost is still a small army (1,000-2,000) of men with crowbars and hammers.

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