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BY JOHN P. McDERMOTT
Posted: March 14, 2014 @ Post and Courier

The support braces along Woolfe Street are gone. And so is the building they helped propped up for the past few months. A corner structure on Upper King Street that once housed the retailer Super Bad, The King Of Fashion, has been reduced to rubble.

The tear down started this week. The building was razed by Thursday, when work crews began cleaning up after the demolition.
Super Bad, which opened in 1987, relocated to Fabian Shopping Center on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston late last year.
Basim Hassouneh, owner of the retailer, watched the building fall this week with crowds of onlookers on the sidewalk across King Street.

“I was crying because I had been there for 26 years, you know,” Hassouneh said Thursday.

Abraham Dabit, a relative of Hassouneh’s, owns the building. The two have begun drafting plans for the new store that will go on the same lot at 532 King.

“We’re going to rebuild it as fast as we can,” Hassouneh said. “Once the demolition is complete and the city gives an OK on the design, we’re going to start building.”

In court filings, Super Bad’s lawyer said the foundation was damaged by a construction crew working on an adjacent structure. The construction company and subcontractors said the damage was superficial.

The city’s Department of Planning, Preservation and Sustainability said that when it inspected the Super Bad building, it discovered extensive damage from wood rot and termites.

It then condemned the building. In December, a structural engineer concluded that it couldn’t be saved.
Braces were installed to keep the structure from falling, and the sidewalks along the front and side of the building were closed to pedestrians.

Abigail Darlington of The Post and Courier contributed to this report.