I had a pretty interesting weekend. Birthday dinners for friends on Friday and Saturday nights and a crew setting up to film a (potential) TV show in our apartment for a few days. That's more than we usually have going on over the weekend, but that isn't the interesting part.

Anyone who has been to my condo knows that the building is very close to the Bay Bridge, and our loft overlooks the Harrison Street offramp. Until CalTrans closed the offramp recently, the significance of this fact was limited to friends waving from their cars as they exited the bridge. This weekend the offramp was demolished.

Now before you get excited, I should say that they don't seem to use explosives for demolition around here. They didn't even use them when tearing down the Bank of America building (you know, the white one with the digital clock in San Francisco) recently. I would have been really excited to see an old-school-Vegas-casino style demolition, but this was still pretty cool.

Last week there was lots of middle-of-the-night prep work which was fairly disruptive, but that was nothing to the giant jackhammer machines that ran 7am-10pm Saturday and Sunday. It turns out that it doesn't take very long to get a headache from that kind of constant noise.

Other than the noise, it was so cool to have a front-row seat. You may write off my fascination as me being weird (which is fair enough), but I saw plenty of picture-taking and ogling from the neighboring buildings.

While I'm sure that the Bay Bridge retrofit project is sorely needed -- and our building will definitely be a lot better off once it is done -- watching the machines do their work got us wondering how severe an earthquake would have to be in order to bring that structure down. The operators really knew what they were doing: they seemed to have a well-developed process for bringing these things down, and it was fun to watch.

No exaggeration, I think we watched those machines for ~5 hours over the course of the weekend. Watching the jackhammers break through 3 feet of concrete like it was cardboard was better than TV. Which is why I had a headache all weekend...

To be fair, most of the heavy demolition work was done on Saturday, so the noise wasn't nearly as bad on Sunday. Though there was still enough noise to freak the setup crew out on Sunday.

All in all, I wouldn't have missed this for the world. I mean, how often do you get to see something like that from such a close distance. I can't say that I'm looking forward to CalTrans tearing down the entire western approach next year, though. The hallway overlooks that, and there will be way too much noise without the benefits of not leaving the couch. I think we'll plan a trip out of town that week.

Unfortunately, I don't have any "before" pictures of the offramp, but here are some of the shots we took through the weekend.