Bulldozers threaten Casavant-Freres Opus 3105!!!!!

[KB7DQH]

Tara Bannow
Iowa City Press-Citizen

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• To view the auction listing on IronPlanet, go to www.ironplanet.com/for-sale/Other-Casavant-Freres-Ltee-Opus-3105-Pipe-Organ-Iowa/460610


If you're into bidding on used construction and agricultural equipment online, perhaps you stumbled across an interesting item recently: the organ in the University of Iowa's Clapp Recital Hall.

The massive mechanical action pipe organ, which has been collecting dust in the Hancher-Voxman-Clapp complex since the 2008 flood, is for sale on the online auction site IronPlanet at a price tag of $60,000. The building is scheduled for demolition in about two months and will be replaced with a new, $176 million Hancher Auditorium uphill and a $120 School of Music building downtown that will include a new recital hall.

UI officials left the fate of the instrument — and any other items in the building with sentimental or historic value — up to the company in charge of demolishing the building. Among those who requested the organ, an Iowa City church hopes to put it in its future building.

The project's demolition contractor has one criterion in choosing who gets the organ: getting the biggest bang for their buck.

"Wherever we can maximize our monetary return is where it goes," said Cork Peterson, owner of Reinbeck-based Peterson Contractors Inc., when asked how he'll determine who will receive the organ. He said the company will keep the proceeds.

UI awarded the contract to Peterson Contractors after it came in as the second-lowest bidder at $1.5 million — below the engineer's estimate of $2 million. The demolition will begin in early October at the latest, Peterson said.

"If we don't find an owner that is willing to monetarily compensate for the salvage value, we're just going to scrap it," Peterson said. "We don't want to do that, but we got the job because we were the low bidder, so we have to maximize our monetary return from our bid."

Matthew Penning, director of music ministries for St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, said he's hoping Peterson will decide to donate the organ to the church and take the resulting tax benefit. The congregation hopes to build a new church on Camp Cardinal Road in 2015.

The original list of six hopefuls — everything from churches, music schools and organ restoration companies — has since been narrowed, but Peterson declined to specify how many organizations or individuals still are in the running. Penning said it's just St. Andrew and Edward Zimmerman, an organ and harpsichord professor at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. Zimmerman didn't return a request for comment.

The organ was installed when the building opened in 1972. Organ experts say it was among the first of its kind to be installed at a U.S. university. At the time the Canadian company Casavant Frères built it, mechanical action organs were experiencing a resurgence over electric action organs.

The company originally tried to sell the organ on eBay, but a site administrator told them it exceeded the site's maximum price rule for infrequent sellers, Peterson said. Bidding for the organ on Iron Planet ends Friday. There were no takers as of Tuesday evening.

A major hitch for whoever ultimately gets the organ is that they'll have to pay an estimated $100,000 to remove the intricate instrument, whose pipes take up almost an entire wall in the recital hall. Penning said a consultant told him it'll be another $400,000 to clean and store the instrument. He said he thinks Peterson Contractors will have a hard time finding someone who will pay that in addition to thousands of dollars for the instrument. Organs are notoriously difficult to move from one building to another, and they're typically designed and built for specific buildings.

At the time the organ was built, it cost $125,000, money that was paid by Iowa taxpayers, Penning said. He said he thinks that's enough incentive to keep the instrument local.

"It was originally intended to be an instrument for Iowa," he said. "Not only for the University of Iowa, but to be an essential teaching instrument and an instrument for a broader sense, for Iowa City, for cultural purposes and also for the state to have a good instrument for this program to be successful."

In an April interview with the Press-Citizen, Beverly Robalino, then UI's senior design project manager, said Federal Emergency Management Agency rules required UI to relinquish control over items in the building to the demolition contractor.

"It's totally out of our hands," said Robalino, who retired. "We tell them who's interested, and it's totally up to the contractor to work with anyone on this list or not to."

But Barb Sturner, an external affairs specialist with FEMA's Kansas City, Mo., office, said there is no such rule.

On Tuesday, Rod Lehnertz, UI's director of planning, design and construction, clarified in an email that FEMA advises UI to maximize its eligibility for funding. FEMA is paying to replace the Hancher-Voxman-Clapp complex. Had UI made money from selling items inside, FEMA may have decreased the amount it paid, he said. Likewise, bidders wouldn't have factored in money they would have made selling the items, so the project may have been more expensive.

"It is the University's intent to avoid any optional actions that might lead to interpretations that could negatively impact federal funding eligibility," he said. "In the case of Hancher-Voxman-Clapp, when the University was contacted regarding interest in a component of the building, that contact was included in the bidding documents so that the bidding contractors could contract those sources while establishing their bids."

Sturner said it's unclear whether FEMA would have needed to adjust the amount of money it's paying to replace the Hancher-Voxman-Clapp complex had the demolition bids been higher.

Reach Tara Bannow at tbannow@press-citizen.com or 887-5418.

http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20130724/NEWS01/307240007/No-bids-yet-organ

Eric
KB7DQH

[KB7DQH]

... SAVED!!!  Seehttp://www.cbs2iowa.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/ui-pipe-organ-going-church-20851.shtml andhttp://www.press-citizen.com/article/20130821/NEWS01/308210001/UI-pipe-organ-finds-a-new-local-home?Local%20News for details...

Eric
KB7DQH

[diapason]

Good news indeed!