The Peterson Hall of Science 3 building will end its 46-year stay at Cal State Long Beach when construction crews begin the demolition this week.
The construction of the new building will be finished by 2010, according to the PH3 construction page.
The original building lacked air conditioning and a good ventilation system, prompting CSULB to replace it rather than renovating.
“We’re putting in a new one [building] that’s bigger and meets science needs of the 21st century – not the middle of the 20th century,” said Robert Loeschen, director of instructional and research facilities for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
The new building will offer students up-to-date labs, like those in the Molecular and Life Sciences Center, two large lecture halls that can hold up to 180 students each, two medium-sized lecture halls, and a vivarium, Loeschen said. The building’s roof will have a greenhouse with telescopes for astronomy courses.
The building replacing PH3 will house parts of all five natural science departments: all of the geology, science education and physics departments; half of the biology department and a third of the chemistry department, Loeschen said. It will also house the administrative offices for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
For now, classes have been moved into the PH1 and PH2 buildings.
“Its not a perfect fit because some of their labs were custom to the facility,” Loeschen said. “But they have a good amount of space, we’re fortunate that the plan that was cooked up gave them certain space so that we would not be impacting the students.”
The Hunt Construction Group Inc. will be demolishing and reconstructing the new building. The building will be demolished by August, but the building’s cleanup will take until mid-September to complete, said Gene Vincent, project manager for Hunt Construction Group.
“[The demolition machinery] will essentially chew the building up,” Vincent said.
The impending loss of a building with so much history led some current and former faculty members to hold a memorial service for the building.
The atmosphere at the wake was “one of hilarious sentimentality,” said Darwin Mayfield, a former CSULB chemistry department chair who taught classes in PH3.
Meeting near the PH1 building and wearing black armbands, faculty members walked toward PH3 as they listened to a jazz band play the funeral dirge. Unable to enter the building, which was surrounded by a chain link fence, faculty members spoke in the Glen Nagle Courtyard to share some of their memories about it.
One of Mayfield’s memories about the building happened in the late 1970s when there was an investigation into why fumes exiting the top of the building were going back inside. Fine powder was dropped from the roof only to discover that the breeze from the ocean was carrying the fumes from the roof top stacks back into the building through the windows.