FOCUS: PRESERVATION
Dangerous old stable drives five families from their West Side homes
Fire Department's evacuation order is not legally binding
While a landlord, preservationists and City Hall haggle over the fate of a 119-year-old horse barn on Jersey Street, nine neighbors have been without a home for more than two weeks.
The city ordered five families to evacuate their homes after the dilapidated barn’s roof collapsed June 11. Since then, they have been staying in hotels or with friends as they receive mixed signals from the city about whether they can return home.
“No one is telling us if we can legally move back in,” said Peggy Farrell, 77, who rents a cottage behind the livery. “Who’s going to tell us that?”
The fenced-off livery stands in stark contrast to the rest of the West Side neighborhood near D’Youville College. Among neighbors who maintain brightly painted Victorian houses and elaborate flower gardens, the livery’s owner, Robert Freudenheim, is considered the worst property owner on the block.
“I miss my garden,” Farrell said, tearing up at the thought of her exile from home.
Two families that were issued evacuation orders are living in their homes with the knowledge of the Fire Department, which two weeks ago had ordered the houses’ gas lines shut off and the residents to evacuate.
Joe Murray said Fire Commissioner Michael Lombardo told him and his partner that they could turn on their gas the day the “therapeutic demolition” began because their home was at a safer distance from the structure.
Murray said that although his yard still has a mountain of rubble that crashed from the livery’s roof, he and his partner ignored the evacuation recommendation because the house is farther from the building.
Harold and Bunny Roberts returned to their home Monday without permission from the fire commissioner, but when they called the Fire Department to have their gas turned on, they were told to call National Fuel Gas.
Does that mean the houses are safe from being crushed by the unstable barn and the evacuation is over?
“They didn’t say yes or no,” said Harold Roberts, who returned to his house behind the barn on Monday. “They just said call the gas company.”
Peter Cutler, director of communications for Mayor Byron W. Brown, said no one but the Murrays should be in their homes until the fire commissioner says it’s safe, but that the evacuation order was never legally binding.
“There’s no prohibition of the homeowner going back to their houses if they want to,” he said. “It’s just the strong recommendation of the [fire] department that they not.”
Farrell and neighbor Adam Walters, whose houses are within just a few feet of the livery’s west side, both said they wouldn’t move back until the city officially declares the danger passed.
“I talked to the demolition contractor . . . and he said he wouldn’t live there,” Walters said Thursday. “So we’re not going back until there is an official determination that it’s safe.”
Walters has had to separate his family because of the evacuation. While he, his wife and four cats are staying at a friend’s home, his 91-year-old mother-in-law has had to temporarily move into a nursing home to receive the assistance a health care aide provides at the Walters’ home.
Walters said his mother-in-law hated living in a nursing home when she tried it once before and doesn’t understand the reasons for moving out, due to short-term memory problems.
“She wants to know every day why she can’t come home,” he said. “She’s not able to separate her last stay in a nursing home with this one.”
He said that he worries about how the disruption in his mother-in-law’s life will affect her health.
“She wants to live out the rest of her days with her family,” he said. “At 91, your spirit is really all you have left.”
Walters wouldn’t mind seeing the livery completely demolished if it meant they could move home.
Farrell has had her fair share of issues with the crumbling building. The most obvious problem is about 200 bricks that still litter the six-foot space between her house and the livery.
Every time it storms, Farrell said, a cascade of bricks comes down on her lawn. Walters has roped off a six-foot-wide section of his yard to keep visitors safe from falling pieces of the roof and wall.
Wednesday, a chunk of brick fell into Farrell’s yard without any provocation other than some slight wind.
Farrell, one of the plaintiffs in a suit to stop demolition of the building, said she’s torn between wanting to save the livery and longing for home.
“It’s being held up because the preservationists want to save the building and in the meantime we’re all being inconvenienced,” she said. “I mean, I want to save the building, too, but I also want to go home.”
She said moving between the homes of her son, daughter and niece three times a week is exhausting her.
Some of the exiled neighbors are firm in their stance that the livery must stay. Harold and Bunny Roberts said they bought their house behind the livery because of the privacy the building provides their backyard.
“It’s kind of a paradise back there,” Bunny Roberts said of her small yard, which runs into the livery’s ivy-covered back wall. “It kind of became an outdoor living room.”
The couple, who returned to their home after spending 12 nights in a hotel, were showering at a friend’s house and heating water in the microwave before getting their gas turned back on Wednesday.
Harold Roberts, a structural engineer, said he felt safe returning to the house since the livery’s back wall seems most secure. Unlike their next-door neighbor Farrell, they haven’t had to pick up fallen bricks in their yard.
Before a large section of the building’s roof collapsed two weeks ago, neighbors have watched as individual bricks and chunks of roof detached themselves from the structure several times over the last three years.
Frank Scinta, Farrell’s landlord, said he has 23 pages of e-mail correspondence with Freudenheim arguing over damage done to his property by falling pieces of the building. Scinta said Freudenheim never compensated him or adequately repaired the parts of his building threatening Scinta’s property.
Freudenheim has finally been called out by the city in a new lawsuit seeking at least $342,975 from him, his wife, Nina, and their Leopold Holdings LLC for one of their demolished properties and the continuing work on the deteriorating livery.
In a State Supreme Court suit ordered by Corporation Counsel Alisha A. Lukasiewicz, the Freudenheims are denounced for their alleged “disregard for the public safety, the public purse and the city’s historic assets.”
The people displaced or discouraged by the state of the livery said it’s due time Freudenheim was charged.
“Now the pigeons have come home,” Scinta said. “His building is falling apart, and if he had only listened to his neighbors, he would have a building standing strong.”
News Staff Reporter Matt Gryta contributed to this report.
