La Dean Shop going down in Rossville
The disintegrating building in the middle of Rossville is finally going down.
City officials reached an agreement earlier this month with the owners of 303 Chickamauga Ave., formerly occupied by the La Dean Bridal Shop and a bingo hall once stood. The building became the center of an alleged criminal conspiracy that stretched to other small towns in North Georgia, and in March 2016, the structure partially collapsed amid a heavy rain storm.
For the last 15 months, the two-story building has stood abandoned, with a cavedin roof and a second floor exposed to the rain, hail, sun and wind. The city government finally reached a consent agreement with the property owners on June 5.
According to the agreement, the property owners had to either move the building up to code or destroy it by
“... we hope ... within a couple of weeks to have this eyesore cleaned up.” – ROSSVILLE PUBLIC WORKS
last Saturday. They did neither, giving city workers the right to tear it down. According to a Facebook post on the Rossville Public Works page, employees will try to remove most water, power, phone, cable and gas lines this week.
The city also scheduled asbestos testing.
“Pending the outcome of this testing we hope ... within a couple of weeks to have this eyesore cleaned up,” a city employee wrote Tuesday night. “We have worked tirelessly to resolve this issue of the collapsed building.
Finally we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We appreciate the patience of some and look forward to this turn and improvement to the future of our City.”
The Mohwish family, property owners with a listed address in Norcross, Ga., at first tried to hire a company to repair the building after heavy winds caused its collapse in March 2016. According to the consent order, agreed to by the attorneys on both sides, “the repair, alteration, or improvement of the said dwelling … cannot be made at a reasonable cost in relation to the present value.”
Any expense to tear down the building will be treated as a lien against the property. If someone wants to buy the land, Rossville Mayor Teddy Harris said, someone will have to pay off the lien before the purchaser gets clear title to the property.
The Mohwishes bought the La Dean Bridal Shop building for $350,000 in 2004. Joe Mohwish, the patriarch, ran bingo for charity on the first floor. But by 2008, he was the subject of several criminal investigations. According to incident reports, the Walker County Sheriff’s Office found small, video poker casinos in the back of a prepaid debit card business on Happy Valley Road, about 2 miles southeast of the La Dean Shop.
According to the incident report, Mohwish hired employees to work at the debit card shop. If a customer won on the video poker machine, the employee would put money on a card for the winner.
In November 2008, the Dade County Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation looked into Mohwish for a similar operation in Wildwood, Ga. Eventually, the departments charged Mohwish with racketeering.
However, Mohwish never stood trial, dying in 2013. His building still operated bingo, though, until its collapse last year.
Contact staff writer Tyler Jett at 423-757-6476 or tjett@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @LetsJett.