Watch Ensley’s tallest building come crashing down Updated Apr 13, 2021; You can watch the mechanical demolition, completed Tuesday, in the video below. Since 1929, the 10-story Ramsay-McCormack Building has towered over Ensley, a symbol of its once proud business district in a historic industrial hub of west Birmingham. The demolished building will be replaced with a new office tower that will echo the old one, inspired by its architectural elements. Demolition began in the fall of 2020. No explosives were used. It has been a long and mostly gradual process. After years of legal wrangling over the building that the City of Birmingham bought for $1 from a private owner in 1983, building inspections determined that the building had been neglected so long it was unsalvageable and that its walls would not have been stable enough to keep.