Wrecking crews took aim Friday at Snyder Hall at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, using a towering excavator to claw apart the five-story building that once housed pioneering science labs.

Snyder’s former occupants already have moved into the gleaming turquoise- glassed Life Sciences Building, which opened in July and was designed so researchers, professors and students can collaborate across disciplines in a state-of-the-art setting.

Legislators set aside $70 million over the next two years to design and build another new building to go up on the former site of Snyder Hall at McCarthy Mall on the upper campus. Plans are being developed for that structure, which will include “flexible learning and office spaces,” according to the university.

“We are still working on the programming and the basic conceptual design,” Jan Gouveia, the UH system’s vice president for administration, said in an interview. “We are trying to squeeze as many programs as we can in a way that maximizes all of the space.”

“We are very appreciative of the legislative support of our development plans for the Manoa campus and, actually, all of our campuses,” she said. “They have been really supportive of our efforts in the last few years. And you can see how our campus is really transforming.”

The Life Sciences Building sits on the former site of Henke Hall, another outdated building, which was demolished in 2017. The new facility houses the School of Life Sciences along with the Pacific Biosciences Research Center and has 21 teaching and research laboratories.

Gouveia said she recently asked staffers who used to work at Snyder and are now at the Life Sciences Building whether they might want to take a last walk through the old structure before it was was torn down.

“Every single one of them said, ‘No, I have no desire, no thank you,’” she said. “I was shocked. They love where they’re at now. It’s not just new stuff; it’s that they can work smarter, they can work more efficiently. You can really see the level of activity and the kind of energy; you can feel it’s very different.”

“That’s the larger visioning that we have for the campus,” Gouveia added. “We are trying to bring a lot of life to it. We want to support interaction and activity and engagement, and our buildings are a part of it.”

The capital improvements are part of a long-range plan to modernize and upgrade UH facilities to meet current needs. That includes the renovation of Sinclair Library as a Student Success Center, which is now underway. It will become a hub where students can connect before and after classes, with spaces for group or individual study, tutoring and academic advising.

“I think we’ve been able to invest in key strategic projects and parts of our campus that really stretched the value of a dollar to the maximum,” Gouveia said. “The steady flow or reliability of the funding is really what has been the key that has allowed us to make these longer-term plans and move forward. That only works when the Legislature believes in us.”

Opened in 1962, Snyder Hall in its prime housed leading researchers in biology and microbiology who broke new ground in genetics, tissue cell culture and bacterial disease. It was home to the Biological Electron Microscope Facility, which has been used by hundreds of UH researchers along with tech companies, government agencies and academic institutions.

In 1967 the building was named after Laurence H. Snyder, a geneticist who led the university as its president from 1958 to 1963. According to the university, he doubled the number of students, academic courses and degree programs during his tenure.

The fifth floor of Snyder Hall housed the Laboratory Animal Service, which has long since been phased out but at one time kept mice, rabbits, chickens and cats as well as noisy Rhesus monkeys, whose calls passersby could hear.

“The old-timers told me of some brazen escapes in the 1980s,” retired laboratory employee Norman Magno told the UH News service. “Individual Rhesus escaped the pens and climbed down the adjoining coconut trees.”

After Snyder, three more buildings at UH Manoa are slated for replacement or renovation because of their advanced age and condition: Holmes, Keller and Kuykendall halls.

Meanwhile, at the Clarence T.C. Ching Athletics Complex field, old turf has been removed in preparation for the installation of new turf along with a new scoreboard. That effort comes alongside the $8.3 million project to reconfigure the facility to host UH football starting this fall, with the loss of Aloha Stadium. Plans call for new grandstands, hospitality suites, press boxes, electrical and telecommunications upgrades, field goal netting, concession capacity and bathroom facilities.