The Niners. The Giants. The Beatles. Now the venue that once hosted a city’s most beloved sports teams and the Fab Four’s last concert is being reinvented as “The Shipyard” — a $200 million project featuring homes, offices, restaurants and the city’s first urban outlet mall.

But before any new buildings go up, crews must tear down the stadium. We wrote earlier about our favorite building implosions, but the demolition of the ‘Stick is different. An implosion was ruled out due to concerns over dust, so demolition crews from Silverado Contractors are carefully dismantling the stadium from the inside out to reduce the environmental impact. And there is a huge focus on reusing as much of the stadium’s materials as possible.

That is a good thing, because according to city of San Francisco estimates, the concrete from the tear down alone is estimated to weigh more than 48,000 elephants. In terms of cubic yards, that is 80,000 cubic yards of concrete. A lot of that concrete is full of rebar and other metal debris that will need to be separated from the rock before it can be reused.

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In planning documents, the developer — Lennar Urban — stated that it plans to use a single, stationary plant to create the Portland cement from recycled concrete processed on-site. Additionally, recycled concrete generated from the project may possibly used in other projects in the Bay Area.

Demolition is expected to take three months to complete. The project is scheduled for completion sometime in 2017.

Photo from SFGate.com