John Golden's year started out right.

Last week, in the middle of the night, the building at 707 Braddock Avenue fell down. Golden's business is right next door.

It wasn't an accident. A crew from Franjo Construction showed up and started the work after midnight.

Franjo was the winning bidder to tear down 15 buildings along Braddock and Woodlawn avenues between Sixth Street and the North Braddock line. The money is coming from federal community development block grants through the Sanders Task Force.

The company is frequently handling the most dangerous portions of the job, the actual knocking down of buildings, during the middle of the night when traffic on Braddock Avenue is light and pedestrians are mostly home in bed.

A spokesman for Franjo Construction said safety was the main reason.

When Joe Dursa, the borough engineer, asked council if any of them had a problem with the buildings coming down in the early hours of the morning, the response he received from Councilman Matthew Thomas was "as long as he gets it down."

Dursa agreed the best time to demolish the buildings was in the middle of the night: "no traffic, no people walking around."

Golden has wanted the buildings next to his business to come down for years.

Bricks from the facade of the 1893 building started to fall onto Braddock Avenue in 2003, the same year that part of the building collapsed onto Golden's roof.

Golden and the borough tried to keep the sidewalk in front of the collapsing building closed, but people would still walk close to the building on rainy days to stay out of the weather.

Golden's own business, Golden Treasures, sells second-hand and antique furniture. He said some day he might want to buy that land next to his.

"Five years down the road, I see my business expanding," he said. "I'd try to put up a building in five years, a one-story building adjacent to mine."

But, he said, if the county and the borough are planning to recoup any of the more than $400,000 that tearing down the buildings along Braddock Avenue is going to cost, he said, the price could be way out of his range.