Reader Diane J. writes in with these photos and a report (echoing reports from other residents) of a neighbor seeing someone inside the building shortly before the fire. Some neighbors have suggested that squatters may have been living in the vacant school (it was being used as storage space). Here's a link to my earlier post on the topic, and here are two (non-satirical) posts from Titan of Trinidad.
The school has sat empty (other than the office furniture stored there) for the past few years. It was supposed to be surplused, and offered to private developers, but then the city decided to maybe keep it for an unspecified future government use. Then they didn't identify any such use, and it was to go back on the surplus property list. You can read more about the problematic history of that mess on the Trinidad Neighborhood Association's blog.
6 comments:
I wouldn't be surprised if it was ignited by fireworks. I heard them going off last night, same as every night for the last several weeks.
There were a bunch of kids shooting off pop bottle rockets yesterday at the Joe Cole Recreation Center yards near the spray park. This is a very dangerous practice as there are small children that play there and for these kids to to shooting pop bottle rockets, not up in the air, but at folks is a accident waiting to happen.
Something really needs to be done soon.
Maybe this is somehow connected to whatever deal Gray struck for that $600K that got him elected. Just kidding.
Squatters, fireworks, unsupervised adolescents, what does it matter. Abandoned buildings and run down neighborhoods need to go. Enough talk about the "disadvantaged" - there is a pervasive culture of disregard for society and disrespect of the law that needs to (and thankfully *is*) go[ing] away.
One can gripe about the perceived wrongs of "gentrification" but at the end of the day one can argue with people who purchase property, clean up after themselves, and generally start *really* caring about their neighborhood.
Either way - I say tear it down and make it a park, with lots of trees instead of basketball courts.
That school building looks new enough to have been lined with asbestos. But apparently it wasn't?
@ohwhatatangledweb
"Either way - I say tear it down and make it a park, with lots of trees instead of basketball courts."
Webb is across the street from a cemetery. I don't know where you're originally from, but I've never heard of any city that builds a park across the street from a cemetery.
Then again, the Arboreum is across the street from the same cemetery, so maybe this is just a different kind of town.
"Webb is across the street from a cemetery."
What kind of messed up city builds an elementary school across the street from a cemetery?
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