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The owner of the burned Gastineau Apartments has five days to tell the city whether he wants to repair the building or demolish it.
James Barrett, 38, who has owned the building alongside his mother for the past seven or eight years, says it’s too early to tell which way he’s leaning.
“We are way, way too premature for that,” Barrett said in an interview Wednesday. “I have no idea.”
A fire engulfed the top floor of the South Franklin Street apartment complex Monday evening, and city officials essentially condemned it the next day.
No casualties were reported, and fire officials say the cause of the fire is still under investigation.
The City and Borough of Juneau provided Barrett with a timeline on how to proceed now that the city’s building codes officials have deemed the building a ‘dangerous structure’.
Barrett has five days to advise the city of his plans for the building; 30 days to secure all necessary permits; and 60 days to get either the repair or demolition work underway.
The seemingly austere timeline does have some wiggle room in it, Barrett noted, and the city has been helpful in its guidelines.
Barrett says he hasn’t had the time to consider his options yet since his attention right now is primarily on his tenants as he tries to organize times they can reenter the building to retrieve their personal belongings.
Each tenant has to be individually escorted into the building since the city officials deemed it unsafe. The fire department released the building back to Barrett on Tuesday after their scene investigation was complete. That means Barrett is responsible for keeping the building secure and preventing access to the public.
A handful of residents were allowed back into the building on Wednesday to survey the damage in their apartments and grab what was salvageable. No one was allowed back on the top fourth floor, where the fire originated and where the roof had collapsed in on itself.
Residents will likely be retrieving things from their apartments for the remainder of the week.
The apartment complex has 42 or 43 units, almost all of which were full at the time of the fire, Barrett said.
The building also houses two commercial businesses on its ground floor: a boutique and skateboard shop. A nail salon was also located there until this summer.
‘Dangerous structure’
City and Borough of Juneau Building Codes Official Charlie Ford said he and the chief building inspector posted the Gastineau Apartments building as a ‘dangerous structure’ at about 1 p.m. Tuesday.
“What that means is no one is permitted to go in there without meeting certain requirements, so it’s mostly to protect the public and keep people out of there because it is a hazardous situation,” Ford said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Ford added that technically, the city prefers not to use the word ‘condemn’ because most people assume that means the building will be torn down when that’s not always the case.
“Everybody has a kind of different definition of condemned,” Ford said. “But most people think when something is condemned, it has to be torn down, and I guess our definition of condemned is it has to be renovated or repaired to a point where it’s safe to enter again.”
Ford said most the damage to the solid concrete building was confined to the fourth floor, but the entire building was posted as a ‘dangerous structure’ as a safety measure and also to secure the building from potential looters.
Gastineau Apartments, located in the heart of the downtown historic area, was built in 1917.
According to the City and Borough of Juneau’s Finance Department Assessor’s Database, it had a site value of $810,200. The building property value was listed as $1,000,700, and the total property value was listed as $1,810,900, according to the database.
• Contact reporter Emily Russo Miller at 523-2263 or at emily.miller@juneauempire.com.
Comments (23)
Add commentWill it be?
A new hole for downtown Juneau!
Time to go
I've been in this building before and it was a mess. This picture could have been taken before the fire. I feel sorry for the tenants as Juneau has a real housing crunch. A lot of these tenants were on Section 8 so who knows where they'll go.
Fire sprinklers
I hope the cbj and the owner will install a fire sprinkler system weather he decides to repair or rebuild
@Snagger
Really. Maybe this time we can convince SEALASKA to build a casino instead of a museum. If they did that they might accidentally make some money for a change.
tear it down
If it is that old it is no doubt a Haz-mat site full of asbestos and lead paint. Sorry for the folks that lost their place to live and glad no major injuries. Is he the same guy that owns the Bergmann?
Maybe?
High rise condos above a casino and increase the size by getting rid of that ugly fortified park!
Sprinkler
Sprinklers will be required. It wasn't code when it was built but it should be now.
Hmmm...
"....seven or eight years." "......42 or 43 units." Are we guessing? Come on now Miller, you got this!
Affordable Housing
Not much chance that this will be affordable housing in the future with its premier downtown location. Even if they wanted to the development costs and other beaurocratic processes that CBJ imposes prohibit any housing that is not government subsidized from being affordable. Does anyone find it ridiculous that the CBJ is placing all of these short timelines for major decisions, permitting and construction to get underway. It takes 3-months just for a building permit to get date-stamped by the CBJ and they are requiring construction to start in 60 days? Is the CBJ trying to take over this property so they can build another parking garage?
This seems a bit heavy handed...
Depite all the derision of the owner and the building, the Barretts were filling a need in this town that no one else seems to want to get their hands dirty with. People living on a fixed income, social security, and even retired CBJ employees all need a place to live.
And now our City wants to play hardball them? 5 Days to make a decision?? This, while the City allows a derelict burned out shell of a building to remain on Gold St. year after year, and we all remember how the City handled the pit that was downtown. Why the change in approach. Really, five days to decide what they have to do?
It seems the City officials have an axe to grind... where the sense of community?
@ Big Panda
Thanks for commenting.
Yes, it absolutely is a guess. While I have been in the Gastineau Apartments many, many times, I have never personally counted the number of units in the building.
The assessor's database says there are 42 units, but in our interview, Mr. Barrett said there were 43. Hence, '42 or 43 units' appears in the story above.
Barrett said he in the interview he didn't know exactly how long he has been the owner and said it was either seven or eight years. I didn't press him on that, or follow up further in this story, since there were other pressing issues at hand.
Thanks again for reading,
— Emily M.
@ Big Panda
Really?? That's all you got?
@Emily
It might not have hurt to provide complete details regarding the discrepant numbers when you wrote the piece. It seems clear you had the reasons for the discrepant information in hand and yet left it unexplained in the article.
BTW: Your editor missed it as well so it's only half on you.
I really want to know the cause fo the fire
Whoever is responsible should be the one(s) funding everything.
An avoidable tragedy?
This building has been a blight to downtown Juneau for years. The owners have notoriously failed to invest in the property, and have rented units not only to those low-income residents who genuinely need decent housing but also to known drug addicts and dealers. Who was monitoring this place? It was only a matter of time before these apartments went up in flames; our town
is just lucky that no one was hurt and no other buildings were sacrificed.
My heart does not go out to James Barrett, it goes out to the poor people who have lost their homes and their possessions, and who now must scurry around looking for a place to live, right when winter is coming.
@CountThis
Yes, James Barrett also owns the Bergmann. Let's just hope he takes this as a lesson and improve thats place, before it too goes up in flames and takes out a whole neighborhood. If Juneau wants a real sense of community, it would be nice to see our property owners care about their properties and their tenants, and invest enough to make them safe, instead of running these places into the ground for the highest profit margin possible.
Marine View
CBJ should vacate the offoces they rent at Marine View that were made for housing. Those employees would move to the Douglas library after moving the Douglas library to Gastineau school. CBJ saves rent, convenient parking for folks neding to get permits and better use of buildings in Douglas.
Notorious?
@JoeJuneau. Was the place the Taj Mahal when the Barretts took it over? Honestly, I don't know...and I have doubts you do either. Guessing you're simply sniping because it's easy.
Was the place low rent? Yep. (Do I think low income housing should be in the heart of downtown? Nope.)
But, was it maintained? With no information to the contrary, I'd have to say, probably. Did they replace the flooring with red oak, or hang chandeliers...probably not. It was low-income housing.
Do tell us what was so notorius about their maintenace...and please be specific. Or, be a little less hasty to publicly slander folks while you remain anonymous.
Howdy, ever been to the Gastineau?
Well, I had to visit almost daily for a month last spring, when a friend of mine was staying there and was sick and needed help. The place was a wreck, and not because there were not any red oak floors or chandeliers, but because there were old and stained mattresses in the hallways for weeks, because there were uncovered outlets with wires sticking out, because the place reeked of cigarette smoke, because there were bags of trash sitting out....
And those are just the obvious fire hazards.
How much effort would it take to perform simple maintenance, so that hallways are cleared of debris and electrical work is done promptly and professionally? No one expects low-income housing to look like the Taj Mahal, but it should at least be as clean and safe as possible.
With JoeJuneau's description,
With JoeJuneau's description, does anyone else see anything wrong with such a property being valued at almost two million dollars?
Further concerns
I realize we live in a capitalist society, and if people want to make a buck on the lowered earning capacity of others, they can. But. What about the property values, and more importantly the lives, of those put into concomitant jeopardy by a lapse in simple safety measures? Even if you strip the ethics out of this, the pragmatic reality is that we spend tax dollars cleaning up the mess, when an untended property bursts into flame. What about the cost of first responders, the costs to nearby residents and businesses, the fact that power is shut off to deal with it. Perhaps the cause of the fire, this time, was an unattended candle, as James Barrett has said. But there were risks there, with a property that enabled risks I have already described, and everyone turns a blind eye, until it affects them. This is a community, a city on a hill, and we need to make sure that our neighbors are looking out for everyone's interests, so that we can all lower our risk threshold. So that we can all trust our neighbors to do right, by the community we share.
on sprinklers
Sprinklers do not stop fire that is in voids and spaces; as exists in remodels of older buildings.