WATERLOO — Former St. Mary’s students lined East Parker Street in their hats and mittens, anxiously awaiting the bittersweet moment when the building would come tumbling down.
Demolition of the Catholic school and church began Wednesday afternoon, nearly 20 years after the buildings were abandoned.
The first part of the building to go was the kindergarten through third grade classrooms. Former first grade teacher Paula Banes came by to collect a commemorative brick and pointed out her old classroom – now a pile of rubble. She said the sight is devastating.
“I drove by probably about four years ago,” she said. “It was pretty shocking and horrifying to see the condition that it was left in, or that it had become.”
She estimates she taught about 250 children from 1988 to 1998. Along with first graders, she worked with second graders to prepare them for first Communion.
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Thousands of students and parishioners walked the halls and sat in the pews of the building that opened in 1922…