By Saturday evening, crews had nearly finished demolishing the far-right portion of the historic Majestic Hotel that caught fire Thursday in Hot Springs and burned for nearly 48 hours.

Workers started tearing down the building Friday afternoon after the flames were pushed back to the structure’s center. More heavy equipment was moved in Saturday to finish the job.

Two blocks of Park Avenue, where the property sits, have been closed since Thursday evening and will reopen to traffic sometime today, City Manager David Watkins said. The city plans to pull out all of its employees stationed at the scene by this afternoon, he said.

Majestic Hotel owner Garrison Hassenflu, a developer from Kansas City, Mo .,arrived in Hot Springs on Saturday morning and spent the day meeting with city officials and environmental technicians. The city will relinquish the property back to him today after ensuring that the fire is extinguished and demolition is complete, Watkins said.

Hassenflu will be responsible for clearing and hauling the building’s rubble to the landfill. The city is keeping track of its demolition costs and other expenses - which Watkins estimated at between $200,000 and $500,000 - and will seek reimbursement from the owner or possibly place a lien on the property.

Hassenflu said he first heard about the fire shortly after it began Thursday.

“I was absolutely devastated. I love historic buildings. I rehab them all over the region in the Midwest, and my intent was to rehab [the Majestic] into a hotel that I would lease to an operator, or I’m still considering rental housing on the property,” he said by phone Saturday.

The hotel, as it stood before Thursday’s blaze, was built in several phases. The portion that burned was the oldest, built in 1902 by Harry A. Jones after he tore down his former hotel, also named the Majestic, at the same location. In 1925, the second phase was completed, and the Lanai Tower was added in 1962, according to city Fire Department documents.

Owners closed the Majestic Hotel in 2006, and Hassenflu’s company - Park Residences Development LLC - acquired the property in 2012 after a nonprofit failed to turn it into a mix of retail space, apartments and condominiums.

Hassenflu is still considering his options, but he mentioned renovating the two remaining sections and using the now-demolished portion as a parking lot.

The community had long expressed concern about the poor state of the hotel and its various sections.

“These things don’t happen overnight,” he said of refurbishing it. “We’ve already made some other costly applications for financing that has not been obtained. I have a history of reviving old buildings. We’ve been remodeling and re-engineering our development plan for it, and that takes time to get architects involved. And then there’s other consultants on appraisals, market studies and the like.”

But, he said, he understands that the community is feeling the hotel’s loss and that it is “disheartening to see the Majestic devastated.”

“We’ll do everything we can to try to still bring some energy to this whether it’s through redevelopment or we sell the remaining portions of the property,” Hassenflu said.

Even before the fire, city officials had been discussing the need to focus on downtown and its older buildings, Watkins said. The Board of Directors recently passed fire-safety measures, and officials are working with property owners to place sprinkler systems in businesses.

“I think what you’ll see is, because of this tragedy, there will be a renewed support for these fire codes, the life-safety codes and putting in sprinklers because Hot Springs has got a history of these type of fires,” Watkins said.

“I think there’s a real focus right now on the danger potential of these structures. A lot of times you talk about this stuff theoretically, or it was 100 years ago and people don’t think it will happen again. But this gives it a new sense of urgency,” he said of the fire. “I think you are going to see a lot more community and citizen involvement, and demands than we have ever had.”

The city’s history with fire began at the end of the Civil War when most of the then-small village burned down, said Garland County Historical Society Executive Director Liz Robbins.

Downtown Hot Springs again caught fire in 1878, and in 1905, flames consumed 40 city blocks. In 1913, flames destroyed 60 city blocks, making it the biggest urban fire in Arkansas history to date, Robbins said.

Other hotels there have also been wiped away by flames. A wooden Arlington Hotel was torn down for safety reasons and rebuilt with a brick exterior intended to make it fire-resistant. But in 1892, the rebuilt, brick Arlington burned down. It was again rebuilt. In 1946, the Great Northern Hotel burned and wasn’t replaced. A fire in 1973 damaged the Moody Hotel, and it wasn’t replaced either.

But, municipalities are better equipped to fight fires now, and Watkins and other officials praised the various city departments that worked together to respond to the Majestic’s blaze.

For nearly 24 continuous hours, firefighters sprayed the structure, using up to 500,000 gallons of water per hour. Hundreds of thousands more gallons were sprayed Friday and Saturday to douse the smoldering building and debris. The water usage caused pressure problems Saturday for residences north of the hotel, Watkins said.

The Majestic’s loss is being mourned around the city, but people won’t let it keep them down or halt the city’s growth, Watkins said.

“Hot Springs is open for business. We’ll deal with this,” he said. “I think the win-win will be that we’ll get property owners downtown to make their buildings safe, and we’ll start attracting new development and this kind of thing won’t happen to this magnitude again.”

Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/02/2014