Wagga Leagues Club bites the dust | PHOTOS, VIDEO

The iconic building on Gurwood Street is being torn down, with the auditorium ripped apart on Wednesday.

In just a few weeks, the building will be no more.

“They’ve made a big bite into it in the last week or so,” Nash Bros Constructions director Chris Nash said.

The old bowling club area has vanished, with the auditorium currently on the agenda of Kennedy Bros Earthmoving, which has been contracted to carry out the demolition works.

Once the Leagues Club building is demolished and site tidied up, work will begin on transforming what was once the city’s rugby league heart into a major multi-storey unit development.

While excited by the progress to come, Mr Nash said the Leagues Club’s final demise was an emotional moment for the city.

“Most of the people of my generation have spent a fair bit of time at the Leagues Club, one way or another,” he said.

“It was the centre of social activity in Wagga for decades.”

The Leagues Club site was bought by Nash Bros Constructions in 2005 for $1.375 million after the Wagga Leagues Club went into liquidation.

While the building was an iconic mark on the Wagga landscape, Mr Nash said it simply wasn’t possible to incorporate it into the new development, which is slated to include more than 100 new units.

“The old building was not a well-designed or well-fire rated building,” he said.

“It was done in the days before there were pretty stringent fire regulations and just recycling that building into some other use, it just really wasn’t on so it had to come down.”

Once the demolition is complete, Mr Nash said work would begin to tidy up the Leagues Club and neighbouring Eric Weissel Oval sites and development approval would be sought for the next stage of the project.

The iconic blue Wagga Leagues Club lettering is set to be auctioned off this Saturday, with hopes it may fetch as much as $2500 according to one Wagga collector.

Proceeds raised from the auction will be donated to the Men of League Foundation.