Earlier this month Ward Warehouse started to come down, with the claw of a more than 25,000-pound excavator pulling apart the buildings put up 42 years ago using wooden beams.

Those beams, however, along with a variety of other features from the old Kakaako retail complex, are destined for new life.

Storefront doors, restaurant kitchen sinks, light fixtures, railings and maybe even a worn trolley car from inside the former Old Spaghetti Factory are among items being salvaged by Re-Use Hawaii, a nonprofit that recycles construction materials.

“There’s a lot of material,” said Quinn Vittum, executive director of Re-Use, which is working with contractors tearing down Ward Warehouse for property owner Howard Hughes Corp.

Demolition work began Nov. 6, but a Re-Use crew has been sweeping through the empty stores and restaurants for almost three months taking out items of resalable value, including a head-high stained-glass window featuring a swordfish cut out of one tenant space and loads of decorative wood trim from the former Stewart Anderson’s Cattle Co. and Spaghetti Factory restaurants.

“They left a lot of stuff,” Vittum said of Spaghetti Factory, which is yielding fancy railing balusters, newel posts and baseboards. An old trolley shell also remains, though Vittum said he’s not sure that it can be feasibly removed. “We’re still exploring it,” he said.

The biggest haul Re-Use is getting from Ward Warehouse is the structural framing used to erect the roughly 60-tenant complex that was designed by the property’s longtime owner, Victoria Ward Ltd., as a “temporary” use to be replaced by higher-value development. Temporary stretched from 1975 to 2017.

Sections of the wooden beams, which are up to 14 inches wide, are being salvaged by Re-Use after an excavator operator with Tajiri Recycling & Demolition LLC pulls down each building. Metal plates and hundreds of nearly foot-long steel bolts used to connect beams also are being collected for reuse.

“It’s basically a sorting process,” said Todd Apo, vice president of community development for Hughes Corp. “What Quinn and his team are doing is a huge environmental benefit. Going into the landfill would be terrible for stuff like this.”

Vittum calls the beams “pretty special stuff.” He said they are old-growth Douglas fir, and a fresh piney smell is strong as the excavator rips apart building pieces and mauls some beams. Re-Use plans to save at least 8,000 linear feet of the beams and re-mill them into a variety of lumber products, including flooring.

Ward Warehouse is coming down fast, and everything, except the parking garage, is expected to be gone by the end of the year. Removing building foundations will take longer.

In place of Ward Warehouse, Hughes Corp. plans to grass about a third of the site as part of a requirement to establish a public plaza.

Land on either side of the plaza area is intended for luxury condominium towers, though Apo said the timing for construction of the first tower, called Gateway Cylinder, is still uncertain. This tower site, closest to the existing Waiea tower, which opened a year ago, could be fenced in or repaved for parking until tower construction moves forward. The second tower site, closer to Ward Avenue, will be paved for parking because high-rise construction there is projected for 2023. A third tower fronting Ward Avenue will eventually replace the parking garage, but that is projected for 2024.