Walker Furniture family watches as warehouse turned to rubble

It was a wake of sorts.

As the sun slipped below the western horizon Monday night, current and former employees of Walker Furniture gathered in a parking lot near the family-owned store on Martin Luther King Boulevard to watch the last piece of the Walker warehouse turned to rubble.

Work crews contracted by Kiewit Infrastructure West Co., under the direction of the Nevada Department of Transportation, began taking down the 52,000-square-foot warehouse that stood 40 feet high about three weeks ago.

“I have to admit, that first bite kind of hurt a little,” said Daryl Alterwitz, whose family has operated Walker Furniture since 1972.

Alterwitz, an attorney, is now in the midst of sensitive negotiations with the state over the amount the family will be compensated for the taking of the warehouse to move forward on the $1 billion Project Neon freeway interchange at U.S. Highway 95 and Interstate 15.

After last week’s high-profile groundbreaking, Project Neon is underway with preliminary engineering and design and the demolition of buildings in the project’s right-of-way.

Alterwitz said issues of just compensation remain but he didn’t detail any specifics. Besides, Monday night was more of a final farewell to a building that not only provided inventory storage but served as a massive billboard identifying the Walker Furniture campus. Alterwitz was appropriately dressed in black for the occasion.

Alterwitz made it clear that the company isn’t closing its doors. The company also has another warehouse on Cheyenne Avenue in North Las Vegas for inventory.

“Our visibility will definitely be lessened,” Alterwitz said. “But we’re still here and we’re still very committed to downtown Las Vegas.”

The Department of Transportation says 300,000 motorists pass through the freeway interchange every day. Those who are southbound could see the Walker building just off the west side of the freeway.

The continued presence means the company’s “Hope for Heroes” for veterans and the “Home for the Holidays” events for the needy will still be around. The business’ corporate giving is one of the company’s best-known attributes.

Many on hand

Among those on hand for the building’s demise was Maureen Abraham, who has been with the company since 1976 and who once served as controller. Her husband, Jacob, and patriarch Oscar Alterwitz, who acquired the store from the Walker family, were good friends, even though Oscar was a business executive and Jacob performed maintenance at Sunrise Hospital. Eventually, the two friends died three hours apart and since then Maureen has always looked upon her co-workers as her family.

“When I first got here, Oscar felt this building would really be important for the company’s growth,” she said. “It was a tilt-up building, so they poured concrete into a form and when it set, the walls were pulled up with big hooks.

“When the warehouse went up, business exploded. They couldn’t hire new employees fast enough,” Abraham said.

There are now four buildings, including a tent structure, on the Walker Furniture campus with the removal of the warehouse. Abraham said inside the 220,000-square-foot main showroom I-15 traffic noise increased as the warehouse slowly disappeared.

On the building’s last night, the Kiewit crews began calisthenics just before 7 p.m., turned on the spotlights and fired up the earthmoving machines at 7 and completed their final inspection of the jobsite five minutes later. By 7:15, the heavy equipment was piling debris into dump trucks in advance of an excavator with a 90-foot boom moving into place to take down the last wall.

“The crews call it ‘the muncher,’ and that’s exactly what it does,” Alterwitz said.

His sister, Linda Alterwitz-Mizrahi, said the “muncher” looked like a giant dinosaur. She stood on top of her car to get a vantage point for pictures as the machine slowly took away every letter of the Walker sign.

She was hoping to get a chunk of the sign to use as a paperweight souvenir.

A few tears

At around 7:30, the muncher began taking big chomps out of the wall. On some bites, the wall wavered but remained standing. Water was sprayed along the wall to keep the dust down and in the failing light, it almost looked as if the wall was weeping. Abraham admitted she teared up as the building finally came down.

As pieces of the building fell, Alterwitz began quoting T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — “April is the cruelest month.”

By the end of the evening, the wall was gone. Crews will continue to remove the debris this week.

Walker Furniture will live on but another cruel reality will set in. The now-more-visible billboards along the route will stand out and just outside the Walker campus one of the billboards has been purchased by Ikea, the modern-era furniture outlet that is opening a store next month in southwest Las Vegas.

For Walker Furniture, April is, indeed, the cruelest month.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Find him on Twitter: @RickVelotta