< Back to front page Text size – +

No rescue in sight for abandoned warehouse

E-mail | Print | Comments () Posted by Roy Greene November 16, 2010 11:11 AM

Facebook
E-mail

(John Guilfoil for the Boston Globe)

Squatters had moved into the warehouse at 307 C. St., and a fire last December caused $50,000 in damage.

By Sam Dykstra, Globe Correspondent

The abandoned South Boston warehouse is rusted inside and out. Its tress roof, which protects nothing but the air inside, has holes. Trash litters the grounds, protected by a barbed-wire fence. A weathered “Boston Buffalo” sign says that no one has been there for a while nor would anyone want to be.

The property at 307 C St., flanked on one side by houses, was jone of 13 South Boston properties tabbed as unsafe by a city task force that was created by Mayor Thomas Menino following an Aug. 21 warehouse fire in Roxbury. Months later, the warehouse remains in the same poor shape it was in when the report was announced.

But because the structure is privately owned, in no clear danger of collapse and has a fence protecting the property from trespassers, there’s not much the city can do in the way of cleaning the dilapidated warehouse.

“If it’s an empty building that’s secure and not in danger of collapse, nothing really has to be done unless it’s a danger to the public,” said Boston Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald.

MacDonald acknowledged that the list of almost 150 unsafe properties created by the task force was more of a warning to fire officials in case of a fire on the various premises than it was a city ordinance to clean up the properties.

However, the fire department has already had to deal with blazes in the complex. The latest occurred back in December 2009, when several homeless people who had been squatting on the property had to be saved and $50,000 in damage was done by a fire that took an hour to put out.

“The fire department’s been there a number of times in the past couple of years,” said Tony Foote, who lives across the street from the lot on W Second St.

The lot’s owners, SB Housing Enhancement LLC, were cited for “having an unsafe property and leaving it open to trespassers and the elements,” according to a Globe report on the fire last winter. Now, the barbed-wire fence keeps both the trespassers and city citations away.

Still, the group was second on the city’s list of top 20 code violators by money owed as of October 19. It had planned to create a building of condominiums as early as 2006, but those efforts appear to have been abandoned.

Meanwhile, neighbors in the C St. are left to look at the eyesore.

“It’s just a wasted piece of property,” Foote said.

This article is being published under an arrangement between the Boston Globe and the Boston University News Service.