A Chateau no mo’: Demolition in Historic Northeast leaves neighbors fuming

Bill Broderick, an inspector with the city’s Dangerous Buildings division, was driving in the Pendleton Heights neighborhood of northeast Kansas City a week ago when he noticed a vacant building at 308 Brooklyn that people in the neighborhood refer to as “the Chateau.” Part of the roof was missing, leaving the building exposed to the elements. The inspector went inside — he told his supervisors that the structure wasn’t secure — and saw disrepair that, in his opinion, was so egregious that the structure threatened to collapse.

Broderick scheduled the building, and another nearby, for emergency demolition. By Monday, a crew was on the scene with heavy equipment, ready to start chomping away.

Though the Dangerous Buildings Demolition Program is out of money for the fiscal year, a little extra is held over in the budget to tear down buildings that are imminent threats to public health and safety. The Chateau qualified, according to Susan Crider, field supervisor in Dangerous Buildings. When she checked on it herself, she says, she saw that the Chateau’s attic floor had broken through the second and third floors and landed in the basement, leaving a gaping hole in the building’s core. The north wall was so fragile that a heavy snow could knock it down. The four-plex on the corner of Lexington and Brooklyn was even worse.

“If they were closed to entry, no one would have known what was going on with the conditions inside,” Crider says. “But you could climb into the basement,” and a curious kid might have found a place to play under three stories of unstable material, she says.

But some people weren’t ready to see the Chateau go. The president of the Pendleton Heights Neighborhood Association, Kent Dicus (pronounced “Die-cuss”), was shocked to see a demolition crew outside the Chateau on Monday. He called the Landmarks Commission and was told that Pendleton Heights’ historic designation couldn’t trump an emergency demolition order.

Dicus contacted an architect friend who found a colleague at his firm who was willing to put a new roof on the building if it would stall the demolition. Dicus fired off an e-mail to his district’s councilwoman, Deb Hermann, the mayor, and city staff in the housing department, begging for a delay. “PLEASE give us until Monday (March 30th) to meet to put a plan together to try to save these important buildings. You can tell by looking at the attachments that they are beautiful and deserve every opportunity to be saved. Please don’t make the neighborhood suffer permanent losses as a result of one negligent person,” he wrote.

The negligent person Dicus refers to is Gary Marsh, the owner of the four-plex, the Chateau and his own home, all clustered near the corner of Lexington and Brooklyn. He had maintained the facade of the Chateau with new coats of paint, effectively concealing the disrepair inside for years. Crider, with Dangerous Buildings, says Marsh hadn’t realized that the properties were so structurally unsafe until talking with the inspectors. “He seemed to understand and didn’t object,” Crider says, adding that he hasn’t called her office since.

Despite Dicus’ last-minute efforts, the demolition went on as planned. Here’s what the Chateau looked like on Wednesday:

The loss of the Chateau is still reverberating in the neighborhood. The picture above comes from the blog F-Stop Etcetera, where some historic-building-lovin’ outrage is chronicled.

Had the city notified the neighborhood association that demolition was pending, Dicus says, they might have been able to convince Marsh to sell to someone who could save the building.

“We see so many other dangerous buildings,” Dicus says. “I’m not justifying them standing, but … there are others in much worse shape, and for us to not have been notified of any pending demolition in a supposedly historically protected neighborhood, I found that inexcusable.”

Marsh has not yet responded to a request for comment.