Restoration work on one of East Chicago’s oldest, and, in its heyday, most beautiful buildings is progressing rapidly.
The Levin Building, located at 3729 Main Street, sits in the heart of the city directly across from Unity Plaza. Originally built about 100 years ago, it features an ornately carved façade with a variety of artwork and insignias – including the namesake “L. Levin.” It has played host to a number of businesses over the years, including a furniture and appliance shop, but the restoration work will see it transformed into a new community gathering place: a banquet hall.
Korellis is one of the primary contractors that has performed work on the building. The company, well known for its roofing work, also provides masonry and concrete restoration services, wall panel installations, sheet metal work, and more.
"We worked with the City of East Chicago, and they let us close some parking spots around the building to use for our equipment," Leo Artuso, superintendent at Korellis, said. "We were able to set up our crane right there on the main road. That allowed us to safely hoist all the roof tear-off down from there and move our materials up there."
The company has done extensive work on historical buildings in the Region, but the Levin building being embedded in the middle of a block on one of East Chicago’s main roads, as well as the building’s advanced age and design quirks, posed some unique challenges.
Many on the Korellis crew did not realize just how much history the building has until they got the roof and started tearing off the old material.
“There were multiple layers of hot roof on the building that were so old that they just crumbled when we started tearing it off,” Joel Johnson, foreman at Korellis, said. “It was so deteriorated that it was basically like shoveling dirt. Normally you can cut that stuff up and pull it apart in chunks and throw it in a scrap box.”
Korellis, always looking to stay on the leading edge of tools and technology for its crews, had the tools to help make the process a lot smoother.
“Korellis isn’t afraid to spend a little to make the job safer and easier,” Johnson said. “We have a Ramrod, which is like a miniature Bobcat, that we were able to use to shovel a lot of that dirt and debris.”
The entire process, Johnson noted, made him reflect on the achievements of the roofers who came before him – the ones who laid down a roof that remained strong enough to safely work on around a century later.
“I think about the challenges those men dealt with when they were working on something like that,” he said. “It’s so unique what men and women can do. Roofing is a hard, challenging job even with the tools we have – and they didn’t have those back then.”
With Korellis’ leg of the restoration work wrapped up, the team is excited to see the Levin building once it is finished.
"This project is a great milestone for us, another feather in the cap," Artuso said. "The Levin building is something you're proud to work on, it's really something special."
To learn more about Korellis and to see a portfolio of its work, visit korellis.com.
