Infignos Media - Anniston City Land Company building faces shaky future

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Anniston City Land Company building faces shaky future

Saturday, February 11, 2012

The Anniston City Land Company building, an historic but deteriorating structure owned by the city of Anniston, suffered another blow this week.

A city building inspector cited the 123-year-old building this week as a nuisance property and recommended demolition.

City Manager Don Hoyt said he will present the citation, dated Feb. 8, the day the collapse of an outer wall of the building was discovered, to the Anniston City Council for discussion at its meeting on Tuesday.

If the building were private property, the city would have sent a citation to the owner, Hoyt said. In this case, the city owns the building.

“So, they sent the citation to me,” Hoyt said.

Floor joists that connected the east and west walls of the building are coming apart from the walls, Hoyt said. There is a risk, he said, that either the east or the west wall could collapse. If the west wall collapses, it could fall into Moore Avenue. That’s why the streets around the building are still blocked although there is currently no work going on at the site, Hoyt said.

Larry Talley, a city building inspector, said he inspected the structure the day vibrations from demolition work nearby caused a corner of the building to collapse. He made a recommendation to demolish the building because he just doesn’t think it’s feasible to repair it, he said.

“It was terrible,” Talley said. “The whole center of the building is just collapsed all the way down to the first floor.”

The city does have the option to repair the building, though, Talley said.

Talley said the last time he was in the building before this week was about three years ago. He had also recommended demolition at that time, he said.

“My opinion hasn’t changed,” Talley said.

David Schneider, senior director for preservation services for the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation, said his opinion hasn’t changed, either. The building, erected to showcase the young city’s progressiveness to visiting investors, is historically important and should be saved, he said.

Schneider said he hasn’t been inside the building since the corner collapsed, but said he has walked around the building and believes the walls still look sound. The corner which collapsed was not a structural wall and, according to a structural engineering report done a little more than a year ago, had deteriorated to the point that crews would have needed to dismantle it to repair the rest of the building, Schneider said.

“To my way of thinking it doesn’t affect the stability of the building in any way, shape or form,” Schneider said. “It’s no more of a nuisance than it was the day before that happened.”

The citation is the beginning of the nuisance property abatement process. The notice, Talley said, gives owners 45 days to let the city know how they will fix the problems.

In this case, the City Council will have 45 days to determine how it will deal with the building’s issues. The city has owned the building since the late 1990s, and in its care the building has deteriorated.

Schneider said he first started working to save the building several years ago. A few years ago, Schneider had an investor interested in the property. However, there were several roadblocks to developing it. The city had apparently taken ownership of the property and put it in the name of the Spirit of Anniston, a downtown development organization. But the paperwork was missing. The city also held a mortgage on the building that it had never forgiven.

“This thing has been so convoluted, it’s really been hard to market,” Schneider said.

Now, with a new judicial complex being constructed so close to the property, it will be even more difficult to market, he said. Still he said, as long as there are four sturdy walls, he thinks the property is marketable.

He said the Alabama Trust is working with a building in Birmingham that after a fire is basically just a shell, but it has found an interested developer.

“Ultimately, I would like to see a current, independent engineering study,” Schneider said. “I don’t think that things have materially changed.”

Even if the City Council decides to tear the building down, it still has its designation inside a historic district to protect it.

According to city law, the council must go through its Historical Preservation Commission to get a “certificate of appropriateness” before it can knock the building down.

The city earlier this week found itself in violation of that law when it started demolition on some of the other buildings in the same historic district. Hoyt said the city plans to meet with the commission on Thursday to get a certificate of appropriateness for the demolition of those five buildings and also the construction of the new judicial complex on that site.

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Keywords: Anniston,City,building,land

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