News

Sequoia: Demolition imminent, tenants meet to complain

November 28, 2011 4:41 pm by Tracey Taylor

Demolition crews were preparing the site of 2441 Haste for partial demolition on Monday afternoon. Photo: Tracey Taylor

As demolition crews prepared to partially demolish the fire-ravaged building at 2441 Haste Street Monday afternoon, a group of former tenants of the building were planning to meet this evening to discuss securing settlements from the building’s owners and fixing damage from a fire which, they say, could have been prevented.

The demolition work will likely begin in earnest Tuesday. On Monday crews were doing the groundwork in advance of tearing parts of the structure down, including shoring up nearby retail spaces, putting protective matting on the sidewalks and removing parking meters.

Vehicle and pedestrian traffic is still restricted around the Telegraph-Haste intersection because of the danger posed by the unstable building, although cars can now take a left turn onto Telegraph if driving west on Haste.

The owners of the Sequoia Building, Kenneth and Greg Ent, were issued a permit last week to partially demolish the building, according to Berkeley’s transportation manager Farid Javandal. The plan is to take the structure down to 29.5 feet and brace the lower stories of the building with support beams. It will then be possible to create a pedestrian tunnel and open the streets to traffic again, said Javandal.

Damage is clearly evident on the Haste Street façade of the building which is deemed structurally unsafe

A group of former tenants, led by Katherine Kim and Hooman Shahrokhi, has expressed frustration with what they perceive to be poor communication from the Ent family. They also claim the owners were negligent in maintaining the building.

The group believes the results of the investigation into the cause of the fire should be released before any demolition work commences. They say they have been given no access to the building to salvage any of their belongings, while the landlords have. The fire investigation is ongoing, and investigators have been onsite, working with the contractor on getting access to parts of the building.

“We have seen the owners go into the building to retrieve cases of wine and paintings and we are concerned they may be tampering with evidence,” said Shahrokhi who lived in Apartment 45 with his roommate Milad Yasdanpanah who resided in the building for 13 years.

Shahrokhi said that, in 2006, he won a lawsuit against the landlord for electrical problems that caused a fire and damaged his laptop. “But the electrical problem was never fixed. With this kind of history, there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation before there is any kind of demolition happening,” he writes in a press release announcing Monday’s meeting.

There was also a fire in the same building on February 22nd of this year.

The five-alarm fire which began on November 18th, the biggest the city has seen since the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm, gutted the 1916 Sequoia Building and left 68 official residents homeless. There were no injuries or fatalities.

The tenants’ meeting is at 7:00 pm tonight at Wheeler Hall on the Cal campus. Councilmember Kriss Worthington, as well as representatives from the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board, East Bay Community Law Center and Private Law Firms also planned to be in attendance.

Related:
Shop Telegraph: Help area recover from fire say officials [11.25.11]
The Sequoia Building: At heart of Berkeley’s rich heritage [11.23.11]
End of the road for an historic building? [11.22.11]
Friday’s fire “another hit in the face” for Telegraph Avenue [11.21.11]
“Largest fire since 1991″ leaves many locals homeless [11.19.11]
Devastating fire in apartment building, Haste at Telegraph [11.19.11]

10 Comments

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  • Anonymous

    I used photosynth to create this one.

    http://goo.gl/nzKuB

  • Anonymous

    One look at the foundation of just bricks alone will tell you that this older building was built without any thought or engineering nearly right on top on the Hayward fault line.  All of these buildings should be taken down ‘ahead of time’ and replaced as seismically dangerous & unstable as well as generally unsafe for human habitation.  It’s from another era and was done on the cheap and was a basically a thin brick cube waiting to implode.  This fire just took it down real fast without a quake.  I am sorry to say that many buildings in Berkeley and the bay area will suffer the same fate when the earth moves again.  Anything new here will be 25x safer for everyone involved.  You do *not* want to be in one of these things when a 5.6 magnitude hits directly under you.  In a way this is a fortuitous event, especially with no injuries or fatalities.  So disaster does equal opportunity in this regard. Seize the moment and make ‘that change’ for future generations if not this one.          

  • Anonymous

    They can be retrofitted, as some of them already are.

  • Charles_Siegel

    I wonder why the city only gave a permit for partial demolition plus bracing of the lower stories, not for a full demolition.  If anyone has any information about the city’s reasoning, I would appreciate hearing it. 

    It seems to me that a partially demolished building will be an eyesore there – making the neighborhood look bombed out. 

  • Anonymous

    My guess is that the purpose of the partial demolition permit is to bring the unreinforced walls down to a level where they don’t pose a safety risk to pedestrians and cars.

    When remodeling a home or garage, people often leave part of a wall standing; I believe that allows them to rebuild a structure to current code and within the current footprint.

    Contractors and architects would know for sure … I’m simply speculating here.

    Ira

  • Charles_Siegel

    Thanks for that thought: partial demolition might make it easier bureaucratically for them to rebuild.

  • Bruce Love

    And it can save money, be greener, and possibly result in a better reconstructed building.

    http://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-11-23/article/38907?headline=Thoughts-on-the-Sequoia-Apartments–By-Kirk-E.Peterson

  • Bruce Love

    Speaking fo Kirk Peterson, he wrote:

    I am currently designing a new building to be built on the empty lot
    across Telegraph Avenue from the Sequoia Apartments. I would love to
    use the colored brick, marble, and terra cotta that architects got to
    use a century ago. Modern economic constraints preclude that, but it
    would be nice to keep what’s there. We could recreate the long lost
    Berkeley Inn: it would be hard to argue against its handsome design,
    but we’re choosing to do something less conventional and more in the
    spirit of the new Southside Plan.

    http://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-11-23/article/38907?headline=Thoughts-on-the-Sequoia-Apartments–By-Kirk-E.Peterson

  • Charles_Siegel

    That is great news – at least, I think so.  I would expect a good design from Kirk Peterson, but when he says “we’re choosing to do something less conventional” I begin to worry that the owner of the site wants something like his souvenir T-shirt store on Durant and Tele.

    Most important, it shows that work on developing that site has started.  I hadn’t heard anything about this before, and I consider it great news.

  • Berkeleytard

    Watching the demolition this morning really illustrates how dangerously weak unreinforced masonry buildings really are.   I never gave this building much thought, but in an earthquake it clearly would have been a disaster. The fact that it was built 10 years after the ’06 quake is a testament in itself to the role of regulatory oversight, because the “market” clearly didn’t solve this one — then or now.

    Sorry to see the architecture gone, but good riddance to the structure.