The demolition of Florida A&M University’s historic Gibbs Hall officially started Monday, but the deconstruction will not be visible until next month as the process takes place from the inside out.
“We’ve got some underground work and some interior work we have to do before we actually start taking the building down,” FAMU Facilities Project Manager Bodie Young told the Tallahassee Democrat Monday. “We won’t start getting the big trucks on site until sometime in June, so the big stuff on the outside probably won’t happen for another month.”
Gibbs Hall — which was built in 1955 and named after the university’s co-founder Thomas V. Gibbs — shut down in 2019 due to extensive structural issues known as structural spalling, which is when water gets into a building’s foundation and causes it to break into fragments.
The damage was found during a water leak and led to the relocation of dozens of students who were living on the residence hall’s ground level, where 15 rooms were affected.
Although students continued to live in the parts of Gibbs Hall that were not affected, it was only a matter of time before the memory-filled building would close entirely as inspections revealed a public safety hazard.
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The last time that the residence hall was remodeled was in 1989, and it housed about 300 students before its official closing three years ago.
The year that the building closed down was also the same year that FAMU’s Diamond, McGuinn, Cropper and Wheatley halls were demolished.
If FAMU officials made the decision to renovate Gibbs Hall instead of demolishing it, the starting cost for repairs such as utility re-routing and the rebuilding of the ground level rooms would be between $1 million to $1.3 million at the time.
But FAMU officials recently made the plan to replace the residence hall along with other sites with new buildings through the university’s recently announced student housing project, which will add 2,000 beds on campus by 2026.
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A residence hall with 500 beds will be built at the Gibbs Hall and former Paddyfote site on Wahnish Way, a residence hall with 700 beds will be at the Osceola gravel parking lot at South Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and a mixed-use apartment complex with 800 beds will be constructed at the former Palmetto North site.
The 500-bed residence hall and the 700-bed residence hall are both expected to be complete by fall 2025, and the 800-bed apartment complex is slated to be ready for students by fall 2026.
Prior to the current process of demolishing Gibbs Hall, other recent residence hall demolitions on FAMU’s campus have included the Paddyfote Complex in 2021 and Truth Hall, which started being torn down in February.
Although the exterior parts of Gibbs Hall have not been knocked down yet, the parking lot behind Sampson Hall and Gibbs Hall have been fenced off as the demolition process is underway, according to a message that was sent to the university’s students, faculty and staff Friday.
Contact Tarah Jean at tjean@tallahassee.com or follow her on twitter @tarahjean_.
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