Little has changed at site of collapsed building|[01/25/07]
Published 12:00 am Thursday, January 25, 2007
Wood debris still hangs over broken bricks and chunks of concrete that once held together the east side of a downtown structure, now a hollowed tower of aging masonry near the corner of Clay and Washington streets.
It is a scene largely unchanged from a year ago today at 11:15 a.m., when the building at 707-713 Clay Street collapsed just after workers inside cleaning it heard creaks and cracks and fled for their lives. All escaped unharmed.
The old structure was to get new life as an antique mall. Instead, it remains a mess in the city’s historic district – mired in pending litigation.
The initial reaction of Mayor Laurence Leyens was hands off.
“We’re not going to touch a brick,” Leyens said. “If we touch one brick and another building falls, we can be sued.”
Yet to hear the owners tell it, the city thwarted efforts to clear the site and rebuild.
Chancellor Marie Wilson is to hear all about it May 15 and 16 in her courtroom in Greenville.
The central question will be whether the edifice should be preserved, as the city wants, or demolished, which is what owners now want.
“It is financially viable to restore the structure,” Leyens said this week, adding he has had recent contact with two potential buyers who, if the judgment in court ends up being in the city’s favor, would purchase it from owners Preston and Mary Reuther and restore the site, front and back.
“We won’t be left with a hole there. They would finish the job the Reuthers started,” Leyens said.
An overriding factor in the year-long process to determine what to do with the building’s remains is its location in the heart of the Uptown Vicksburg National Register District, where most of Vicksburg’s historic structures are located. Stretching westward to the Yazoo Canal from First North Street, it is where Reuther and his wife, Mary, purchased most of the 14 properties they snapped up in Vicksburg when a simple Internet search on “historic homes” inspired them to move here from New Orleans in 2002.
Immediately after the collapse, the Reuthers said they were insured and would rebuild. Eventually, that plan changed.
All plans to alter any property within the district, including demolition, are subject to examination by the Board of Architectural Review. Less than a month after the collapse, that panel denied a demolition plan submitted by an engineer hired by Reuther despite renovation costs being tabbed at more than $2.7 million.
Historic preservationists who agree with the mayor’s stance said the property is worth saving.
“It’s a very important part of the streetscape,” said Nancy Bell, director of the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation. “It’s not so far gone it can’t be rehabbed.”
After Mayor Leyens and both aldermen rejected the Reuthers’ appeal of the board’s decision, instead endorsing a plan to stabilize the remaining structure at 707 and 709 and clear the fallen portion that housed 711 and 713, the city contracted with Texas contractor Patrick Sparks to perform the stabilization for $17,500.
The work was to be done by Parson Construction, the company that had subcontracted J&W Construction to perform the pressure washing that led to the collapse. But its owner, Freddie Parson, could not obtain proper liability insurance to complete the work, setting off months of bickering between Reuther and multiple construction contractors doing work to other parts of the block affected by the collapse.
By midsummer, the Reuthers had hired Bill Greenwood of Antique Wood and Brick of Mississippi to take the buildings apart brick by brick, work that had begun by June.
But the city ordered work stopped in July, holding anyone violating the order arrested. The Reuthers filed a petition in Warren County Chancery Court accusing the city of advertising for bids for stabilizing instead of dismantling the property and assessing all costs associated with it to them.
The Reuthers have retained Flowood attorney Phillip Buffington to represent them.
Fallout from the building’s collapse was felt in more ways than just the rumbling train-like sounds which some of the 23 workers inside likened the implosion.
The Reuthers, who had come here enamored, said they felt thwarted and disgusted. They have sold at least half of the properties they bought and closed Master Wire Sculpture, the business they operated further up Clay Street. Calls to phone numbers registered to the Reuthers at mid-summer have since been disconnected.
Traffic was halted for six months after the collapse, and now must negotiate a sharp turn around a chain-link fence. During that time, small sections were accessible only to motorists trying to reach Trustmark Bank’s drive-through window, Adolph Rose Antiques and the B’nai B’rith Club.
Vicksburg’s major tourism and promotional organizations, the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau, Vicksburg Main Street and the Vicksburg-Warren Community Alliance, were moved out of their single complex at the west end of the block out of fear for the entire block’s structural integrity.
It even left ripples in the political realm, as local bed and breakfast owner Harry Sharp’s temporary lease agreement with the VCVB to house its operations in a vacant storefront across Washington Street led to a state ethics review when Sharp was nominated for a position on the VCVB board.
An antique in itself, the 140-year old structure had been witness to quite a history prior to it being bought by the Reuthers.
It is a history that began with its construction, believed by preservationists to be in the 1860s.
It was an anchor in what was known in the opening decades of the 20th century as the “Hoffman Block,” a moniker attributed to Louis Hoffman, who operated Hoffman Hardware there from 1877 to 1917.
Reflective of the tradition of family-run hardware stores prevalent throughout the nation, the building then housed O’Neill-McNamara Hardware from 1918 to 1958.
The 1960s saw four different businesses occupy a space at that address: Haden Hardware, Vicksburg Finance Co., Michaeleen’s Hair Styling Salon and Bella’s Hess Catalog Store.
City directories cite the trio of addresses as being vacant from 1970 to 1972. In 1973, the property was purchased by Bertha and Charles Haik, who operated Thomas Furniture Store there for 30 years until their son, Steven, moved the business to its current location at 1711 Washington St.
On Oct. 14, 2005, the property was sold for $230,000 to the Reuthers, who had come to Vicksburg with dreams of buying up historic properties and fixing them up.
In January 2005, before the Reuthers purchased the Clay Street building that would meet its demise a year later, the couple marveled at their investments with hope, even stating at the time that the city was “very easy to work with” when it came to issues of historic preservation and making renovations.
“It’s a lot of work, but it could be a great property one day,” Preston Reuther said, referring to the former Downtown Pawn Shop at 1209 Washington St. they were to repair.
Those hopes are gone with the Reuthers themselves, who had planned to use their properties as rentals.
The Warren County Tax Assessor’s office pegged the assessed valuation of the property at 707-713 Clay Street at $70,110 for 2006.