Backdraft Building Brought Down

September 23, 2025

This article originally appeared in the March 1995 issue of the magazine, then called Demolition Age.

Seated on the banks of the south branch of the Chicago River, in an industrial area of the nation’s third largest city, lay a building with an interesting past. Once the home to a thriving printing house, the Cueno Press Buildings on Chicago’s Southside were used extensively in the Ron Howard-directed fire department epic “Backdraft.” The film, which starred Kurt Russell, Robert DeNiro, William Baldwin and Scott Glenn, dealt with the daily workings of an urban fire department and an ongoing arson investigation.

In 1991, one of the two Cueno buildings was used in the final dramatic scenes of the film when Kurt Russell attempts to rescue arsonist and fellow firefighter Scott Glenn from a fiery industrial inferno.

In 1989, a very real fire burned for days at the site when the warehouse structure, used mainly for storage of old tires, caught fire and gutted the interior, save its huge concrete columns. Rebar in the columns hung eerily in curls from the fallen floors on all seven levels of the building.

The burned-out structure made it perfect for Ron Howard’s film. However, after the film, city officials began to view the building as a significant eyesore.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, as part of his administration’s efforts to spur industrial redevelopment in the city, was interested in removing the building from the tax rolls in a fairly dramatic fashion. The city of Chicago did not have any provisions in its local building code that allowed for the use of explosives to demolish a structure. Mayor Daley petitioned City Council to add this provision, and plans were laid to bring the “Backdraft” building down in a very dramatic way.

NDA member O’Rourke Demolition of Cincinnati, Ohio, was given a contract to remove both buildings at the site with explosives. O’Rourke, which is now a woman-owned business as Sharon O’Rourke, wife of the late founder, Pat, has taken over as president, subcontracted the implosion to another family-owned business, NDA member Controlled Demolition Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland.

CDI began its preparatory work early in January of this year, spending approximately two weeks drilling some 1,200 holes into the support columns that were minimally damaged on five different levels of the structure. Selected internal and external partitions were removed by CDI’s crews with the assistance of O’Rourke’s excavators on some of the lower levels of the building. Employees of both O’Rourke and CDI listed the building, with its soot-stained walls, as one of the dirtiest jobs they had ever worked on.

The chimney at the northeast corner of the structure was also drilled at the roof level so that it could be shot on early delays to incline away from the active rail spur that ran only 12 feet from the edge of the building.

Maintaining this rail spur was critical to the ongoing operations of the plastics manufacturing facility adjacent to the site.

The building was located only 15 feet away from the Chicago River, and the city was very concerned about keeping any debris from falling into the river. The city’s specification documents were quite explicit about this. They also wanted the seawall to be protected during the demolition.

A total of 750 pounds of high-velocity explosives were loaded by CDI’s crew over a four-day period prior to the implosion. Delays were sequenced to curl the eastern face of the structure away from the Grove Street side of the site, where the rail spur was located, and the western face, away from the Chicago River.

At 10 a.m. on the snowy Saturday morning of Jan. 28, the honorable Richard Daley gave the signal to begin the countdown for the first-ever explosive demolition project in the history of the city of Chicago.

The implosion was absolutely perfect. The seven-story, 430,000-square-foot former warehouse and screen star came down in a neat pile nestled close to the Chicago River, ready for processing and disposal.

The mayor and his staff were thrilled with the results and plan for additional explosive demolition projects in the metropolitan area. Chicago Building Commissioner Cherryl T. Thomas spoke in glowing terms about the professionalism that the two NDA member firms brought to this highly visible project.

Next, O’Rourke will work on Cueno Press Building No. 2, which will be demolished using conventional methods. Approximately 3,000 loads of debris will be removed from the entire site. The project is scheduled for completion in July 1995.