A month before anyone had heard of coronavirus, the historic Sewickley, Pa. club was confronted with a different type of unforeseen calamity, when a massive piece of its clubhouse ceiling crashed down two floors. But the Edgeworth team’s response was so effective, only one lunch service was missed as the building’s elegance was fully restored.
On Monday, February 3rd, 2020, General Manager Matthew Kurtas, CCM, was getting things in order at the Edgeworth Club in Sewickley, Pa., in anticipation of departing later that week for the Club Management Association of America’s World Conference in Grapevine, Texas. Kurtas was excited about attending the conference to start another eventful year—but he had little idea just how eventful it was about to be.
Assistant General Manager S. Kurt Kochs called Kurtas in his office on an upper floor of the Edgeworth Club’s historic, 91-year-old clubhouse and said simply, “You need to get down here right away.” “Down here” was the ground floor, and specifically the Rotunda Lobby that featured a classic chandelier hanging two stories above, and an elegant curved staircase leading down to the lobby inside the main entrance. But after Kurtas had made his way to that area, he could barely see any of it. “The air was filled with dust and visibility was totally reduced,” he recalls. “A huge medallion-sized piece of the ornamental plaster ceiling, measuring yards wide and yards across, had crashed down and taken much of the stair railing with it.”
After taking a head count and determining no one had been hurt by the collapse, Edgeworth’s management team evacuated the building. Noting that layers of cellulose insulation now covered “almost every asset on the ground floor from the debris,” Kurtas arranged immediately for engineers to come on site to test for asbestos, free radicals and other hazards and confirm that the air quality met OSHA standards, as well as those of the local borough, so the building could be reopened and the recovery process could begin.
BREAKING ONLY FOR LUNCH
In addition to having the staff activate their roles as outlined by the crisis-response plan that the club had in place, Kurtas also quickly included two other key contributors to that process: club President Bill Pietragallo and Michael Cherock, President and CEO of AE Works, a Sewickley-based architectural firm.
While Pietragallo and the Edgeworth Board focused on ensuring safety and arranging clear communication to the club’s member community of over 1,000, and Cherock and his company conducted forensic assessments of the building’s structural integrity and began to plan for its restoration, Kurtas and his staff turned to handling the insurance claim while also preparing to reopen around the construction. By the next day, the first message outlining a “return to the facility” plan had been sent to the membership, with updates then issued regularly, at 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., each day for the next week.
And within 48 hours of the ceiling collapse, the Edgeworth Club was reopened for service, with access through an alternate entrance that the communication updates had directed members to use. While parts of the clubhouse remained closed, food-and-beverage operations resumed, with only one lunch service being missed.
Within 11 days, the club’s main entryway was reopened, with temporary barricades and a drop ceiling in place that “looked like an intentional design feature,” Kurtas says.
Getting the main entry open helped the club retain most of its scheduled events around the restoration, Kurtas notes, with the staff “doing a fabulous job juggling space bookings around construction hours.” A key to achieving that, he adds, was setting up a system to share schedules with AE Works from the start of the project, so there was full transparency and weekly reassessments and adjustments for how club activities could best coexist with construction needs and priorities.
After getting the restoration well underway and starting to serve members regularly again even before February had ended, the Edgeworth staff, like the rest of the club industry, then encountered another “eventful” occurrence of 2020. While the pandemic certainly brought strong new “headwinds” that added to the challenge of running the club and obtaining materials and contractors for repairing the damage, Kurtas says, the need to isolate service areas and events actually meshed well with how activities and construction needed to be arranged.
Through the summer and into the fall, design-build construction continued, incorporating needed code-related modernization in some parts of the building. Being able to make those upgrades cost-effectively pointed out the importance, Kurtas notes, of having supplements in the club’s insurance coverage that would cover the increased cost of construction involved with restoring an historic building like Edgeworth’s safely, while still honoring its tradition and timeless architectural appeal. His experience also reinforced the need, he adds, to regularly bid out insurance to make sure coverage will always reflect and protect against current replacement costs.
“We came successfully through the restoration process for our historic space, including required code upgrades, and the ‘before and after’ pictures are dramatic, and inspiring,” Kurtas says. “There was a lot at play for us during the year—unplanned ‘renovations,’ insurance coverage/risk management, design and tradition, crisis communications, and construction during a pandemic.
“But we closed out our claim and paid final invoices within a year. So while it started out as a tragic structural failure, luckily no one was hurt, and we feel good about how it all ended up and think it’s a story worth sharing.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: A segment of C+RB’s “The Road Back” video series on the Edgeworth Club’s building restoration, with additional photos and extended interviews with General Manager Matthew Kurtas and club President Bill Pietragallo, can be viewed HERE. C+RB
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