The Old O’Shea Office –10 ½ Street
In 1956, business was thriving, so Harold O’Shea (Bud O’Shea’s father and former head of the company) and Bud bought two, forty-feet wide adjoining lots at 1941 South 10 ½ Street. They built a 2,700 square foot building, then a 4,000 square foot addition in the back. “We occupied the front for the warehouse and shop, and leased the space in the rear,” Bud says.
They moved the office to “ten and a half street,” as they called it, from his parents’ home in 1962. “Mom and Dad were grateful not to have the day-in, day-out traffic of sub-contractors, workers, and materials vendors coming to their back door anymore.”
David Copp, who began working for O’Shea in 1964, remembers the building well. “When I first started, Harold, Bud, and Harold’s wife, Jane, were in the office, and we had a laborer and three carpenters. That was Harold O’Shea Builders – six people. There was a counter and a desk behind the counter and two offices and that was it,” David says.
It worked for decades, until nature intervened on March 12, 2006.
“It was 7 or 7:30 p.m.,” Mike O’Shea recalls. “The storm sirens go off. I click on TV and the weather guy says a tornado is on the ground by Knights Action Park (on the south end of Springfield).” He and his wife took their kids into the basement as the tornado passed. But later that night, Mike was listening to the radio. “The announcer said, ‘I’m over by Shepardo’s Restaurant near Ninth Street, and there’s just horrific damage.’”
That was close to O’Shea’s office. Mike rushed to the car. Parts of the city “looked like a war zone” with downed trees and debris, he says. O’Shea’s office was next to the railroad. When Mike got there, he parked on the tracks. “I wasn’t thinking,” he explains.
He was too dumbfounded by what he saw. While surveying the damage, “all of a sudden, I hear the train’s horn.” Luckily, he had enough time to move his car before the train hit it.
The car was fine, but the office wasn’t. The front half of O’Shea’s L-shaped building “got a lot of water and the roof was torn off.” The western half of the building, with the carpenter shop, was “decimated” and the equipment exposed to the rain and wind.
“I was completely overwhelmed,” Mike says. “Although we were planning to build, we didn’t have a place to go to work the next morning.”
He found one immediately, at Springnet, a former client. Half of its building was a disaster recovery center for businesses available for temporary use in emergencies, but it was booked on a first-come, first-serve basis. Mike called the owner while he was still surveying the destruction at 10 ½ Street the night of the tornadoes.
Fortunately, O’Shea had already purchased land on the southwest edge of town, where the current office is located, but they hadn’t started construction yet. They didn’t even have drawings or permits. “Ironically, if we had already built here, the tornado would have wiped the building out,” Mike says. “When we came here the next day, the path of the tornado was cut through the grass” and had demolished a nearby Asian grocery store.
O’Shea moved into the current facility in 2006. In 2017, it sold the old property at 10 ½ Street to the city for a railroad relocation project.