By Paul Hampel
Of The Post-Dispatch

* The head of Spirtas Wrecking and a couple of veteran salvagers are considering turning the demolished Arena's Lamella roof into mementos to be sold for charity.


Arena artifact collectors may get to choose from a few more precious totems salvaged from the crumpled landmark.

Spirtas Wrecking Co. is testing the practicality of making objects of wood from the famous Lamella roof.

"Everybody seems to want a little piece of this building," Eric J. Spirtas, the company president, said Thursday.

The mania for anything Arena already has generated the sale of about 20,000 khaki Arena bricks at $10 apiece. Many, no doubt, are displayed in places of honor with some of the thousands of Arena seats salvaged and sold since the building closed in 1994.

Veteran salvagers Terry Prott and Terry Brookman are working with Spirtas on the project. Last weekend, they submitted prototypes made from the Douglas fir beams installed in the roof in 1928. They included various table styles, a shelf, bookends and a birdhouse.

The finished products are handsome and practical but never will be confused with French provincial masterpieces.

That's not the point, Prott said.

"We would ask that people not expect something they'd find in a fine furniture store," he said. "These things are special and are made from a limited resource."

Prott, 53, and Brookman, 50, aren't sure how much of the wood they'll ultimately recover. A few dozen sooty beams are stacked in Prott's wood shop at 2921 Gravois Road on the near South Side. The shop was once the site of the old So Good Potato Chip Co.

These aren't typical boards. At 3 1/2 inches thick, 17 inches wide and 13 feet long, each massive timber would make for a respectable-size tree.

Prott said he called a local lumber yard and asked whether they carried Douglas fir beams that size.

"They just laughed," he said.

Pulling the beams out of the demolition site has been daunting.

The wood is riddled with 16-penny nails and thumb-thick bolts.

"I'll tell you what, that Arena was overbuilt," Prott said.

A metal detector helps, but Brookman has broken two or three chain saw blades each day on hidden steel since March 12 when he started separating beams from tongue-and-groove pine sheets. The salvagers hope to also find something useful to make out of the inch-and-a-half pine sheets.

Back at the shop, Brookman and Prott wrestled one of the slightly warped beams onto a planer and then eased it screaming into the blade.

It takes about a dozen passes through the planer to restore a beam's straight edge. Scraped away in the process is the greasy accumulation of dust, exhaled tobacco, sweat, evaporated beer and anything else that ever floated to the top of the Arena.

A prepped beam, a visitor remarked, looked good as new.

"Better than new," Prott said. "This wood's got 71 years of history in it."

Spirtas said he's still trying to determine whether the project is feasible. Like proceeds from the bricks, proceeds from any Lamella roof products will go to the charity Outreach St. Louis Inc.

Spirtas, 32, said he's resisted offers to sell all of the wood to a few individuals who wanted it for elite business or home-improvement projects.

"We want to let as many people as possible have a shot at taking home a piece of the Arena," Spirtas said.

Spirtas said that if the company does decide to sell more objects, it will do so through mail or e-mail orders. He wants to avoid a repeat of the crowds that swamped his offices recently to purchase bricks.

© 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, postnet.com