Another fire next door
City-owned Allentown home casts blight on neighborhood
It was around 2:30 in the morning on Oct. 14. Bruce Wetherhold had risen from bed and was about to walk down the hall of his Allentown home to the bathroom when he noticed what looked like fog and flickering lights around the shades pulled down over the window. When he went to investigate, he found orange flames leaping through the walls of the old, abandoned house next door. If they did not act fast, the Wetherholds’ house was next.
“Oh man, the flames were all over the place,” Wetherhold recalled. “I yelled to my wife to get dressed, the house was on fire. Call 911.”
As Donna Wetherhold dialed 911, Bruce, 87, hastened over to his neighbors on the other side of the house, and ushered Kiara St. Cyr and her 16-year-old daughter from their home.
It was a harrowing experience. It was also one that was all too familiar.
Just three years prior, the same house at 1028 W Chew St., which has been abandoned for at least five years according to neighbors, had another severe fire. That time, it had even more devastating consequences — Bruce was hospitalized for smoke inhalation, and a firefighter responding to the scene was seriously injured.
The 2023 fire is still under investigation, so city officials have not determined what caused it. According
to Allentown Fire Department spokesperson John Christopher, the 2020 fire was “incendiary,” or intentionally set.
Wetherhold and other neighbors, however, are questioning how the long-abandoned home had been allowed to deteriorate so badly over time, attracting illegal activity, vermin and trash dumping.
Allentown officials first flagged the property as neglected in 2018, and it became city property in 2022.
But negligence from the former property owner and bureaucratic delays meant nothing was ever done to address the issues, and the building fell further into disrepair.
As a result of the fire, the Wetherholds are displaced from their home of 60 years and do not know exactly when they will return. Kiara St. Cyr and her three children are living in a hotel in Bethlehem.
“It’s been hard,” St Cyr said. “I mean my kids are 6, 10, and 16 and we don’t have a home at the moment, and we’re living out of a hotel. It’s been different.”
Abandoned, and a public nuisance
The single-family row home at 1028 W. Chew St. sticks out like a sore thumb on the block overlooking the West End cemetery. The surrounding historic rowhomes are well-kept, with fresh coats of paint, intact masonry and clean windows.
1028 W. Chew is the exception, with black charring staining the building and a heavily chipped coat of white paint.
The damage is even more stark behind the home. The roof is burned away, leaving just a few warped rows of burnt wood behind and remnants of a charred blue tarp, which two neighbors said had been there since the 2020 fire, illustrating just how little was done in the way of repairs over the years.
According to county property records, the home was built in 1870. Located in Allentown’s old historic district neighborhood, it was taken via eminent domain in 2022 from former owner Gail Hoover, an ex-Allentown City Council member and real estate agent with a Re/Max franchise.
Hoover, who bought the home in 1998 and rented it to tenants until about five years ago, declined to comment for this story.
The home was first cited by the city as a public nuisance in 2018. The sidewalk in front of the home had become cracked and damaged, the property was festering with “noxious weeds,” it was missing a downspout to drain rain water, and a garage at the back of the property had a damaged roof, according to a city report.
But nothing evidently was done to repair the damage. In February 2019, a city housing inspector filed a report that the property “met certain blight criteria,” including being dilapidated and abandoned; having disconnected utilities, built up trash and debris, rodents and vermin; and posing a fire hazard.
According to the court records, the city tried to
contact Hoover in 2019 to notify her that she had 90 days to correct the condition of her property, but were unable to reach her.
The city’s blighted property committee and planning commission affirmed the house inspector’s findings. In 2020, the Allentown Redevelopment Authority received approval to take the home via eminent domain
due to its blighted status.
The authority issued a declaration of taking of the property in May 2021, which is the first step in the eminent domain legal proceedings.
But it took until December 2022 for the redevelopment authority to take over the property, due to court delays caused by the pandemic, redevelopment authority
director Megan Hart said.
“It’s difficult because you would think with eminent domain you could acquire a property immediately, but it’s actually quite the opposite,” Hart said.
The authority planned to renovate the home using grant funds from the city, and sell it to a low-income buyer. Upon taking the property, the agency finalized its architectural drawings and was ready appear before the city’s historic architecture review board for approval of their plans
But the authority never got that far. Earlier this year, Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk revoked $1.8 million in funding for the authority, saying he believed the authority, with its staff of just two people, did not have the capacity to take on development projects.
While court delays and the pulled funds put a pause on any hope of rehabilitating the unsecured property, it continued to deteriorate, leaving neighbors like the Wetherholds and St Cyr to take matters into their own hands.
Wetherhold said he often took the lead on trying to drive out people illegally entering the house, but all neighbors tried to keep each other abreast when they anything going on. Especially after the 2020 fire, they were on high alert.
“We have had to work together to stop random people from trying to get into the backyard to try to gain access to the home,” St Cyr said. “That house is kind of like our baby in a way, because it is a target, people trying to get in there and squat or do drugs whatever it is they were trying to do.”
The home is a nuisance in more ways than one, neighbors said. It attracted pests, vermin and stray cats — St Cyr recalled chasing away a skunk that almost attacked her children — and neighbors also worked together to shovel the walkway and take care of responsibilities that should have been the property owner’s.
St Cyr recalled that several weeks before the October fire, she and her neighbors had been calling the police and city departments more frequently to report people going in and out of the house.
The redevelopment authority’s former project manager, Scotty Smith, would check on the property on roughly a weekly
basis, but the organization did not have the capacity for any kind of round-the-clock surveillance of the home, Hart said.
“You would have to be there 24/7 to prevent anything bad from happening,” Hart said. “Ten minutes after [Smith] leaves somebody could go in, there’s so many things that could go into it that it’s hard to say what could have been done.”
‘This was all preventable’
But neighbors agree on one thing: The fire could have been prevented had the city been able to take swifter action. The property was never properly secured and was a known hazard. And had the property been maintained in the first place, it would never have fallen into such disrepair.
“This was all preventable,” Bruce said.
Allentown officials have long said the city will crack down on blighted and dilapidated rental properties, but has not yet been able to put the resources toward addressing that problem. Allentown has declared 176 properties as blighted since 2019; 89 properties have come off of the certified blighted list, meaning the property owners made the necessary repairs, while 87 remain blighted, and 16 of them are either in the process of being taken or have been taken via eminent domain, including 1028 W. Chew St.
And for a long time, city officials have said Allentown has fallen behind on rental inspections. The city issues residential rental licenses and, according to its city charter, is required to inspect its rentals at least once every five years, but has not kept up with that schedule.
The city issues citations for non-compliant properties — as it did in the case of 1028 W. Chew St. — and can revoke rental licenses if violations are not addressed within 30 days. If problems continue, properties can be declared “blighted,” making them eligible to be taken by eminent domain. The city is in the process of declaring 16 properties as blighted, officials said.
At a February City Council meeting, Community and Economic Development Director Vicki Kistler said a nationwide shortage of building inspectors exacerbated the delayed inspection schedule. The city has had at least 17 vacancies in its Building Standards and
Safety Department this year.
Most of those vacancies have since been filled — Kistler in an interview in November said that the city is close to having a full complement of eight building inspectors, allowing the city to start trying to catch up on lapsed inspections.
But it will take time. As part of its comprehensive housing strategy, which Kistler said will become public in early 2024, Allentown plans to implement a “points system” for landlords, where owners who accumulate too many citations against them will see more frequent inspections.
The city has also changed its strategy from public shaming of problematic landlords — Allentown used to have a public “landlord hall of shame” naming negligent property owners — to meeting with them, trying to convince them to make the necessary repairs and connecting them with financial resources before the city has to legally step in.
“One of the things I’ve come to understand is how complicated the blight process is,” Kistler said. “Just because a property is declared blighted doesn’t mean we have the right to take or do whatever with that property.”
City leaders say that, with its comprehensive housing strategy nearing completion and a near full complement of building inspectors, they are better equipped now than they used to be to tackle blighted properties. But it can be a challenging and time consuming process when landlords are unreceptive, unresponsive and refuse to take care of their properties.
That appears to be the case with Hoover, the former owner of 1028 W. Chew St., as the city had attempted multiple times to alert her that she needed to make repairs to her property, but to no avail. It took four years between the city first citing Hoover’s property and it officially taking ownership.
Records show that Hoover, who owns several properties around the city, has had at least three properties foreclosed upon and has been taken to court several times over failure to pay property, school and water and sewer taxes. Court records also show she has filed for bankruptcy at least three times.
Too little, too late?
While the city is now putting more resources toward addressing the problem of blighted and neglected properties, for St
Cyr and the Wetherholds, the damage is already done.
St Cyr’s home suffered the brunt of the water damage — firefighters responding to the scene used her roof as a vantage point to hose down the flames.
Her home became collateral damage. Water stains are visible on the walls and ceilings, and most of her furniture was not salvageable and had to be discarded — though as a renter with insurance, she is not liable for those costs.
She said it’s been a challenge having her life uprooted with no warning. She and her three children are now living out of a hotel in Bethlehem, and she has a longer commute to Coplay where she works as a hairdresser.
It could be a while before she is able to move back in. A damaged firewall between the two homes is continuing to leak water from 1028 Chew into St Cyr’s unit, she said.
“It’s been a lot,” St Cyr said.
More than a month after the fire, the Wetherholds’ home still reeks of smoke, and they said most of their furniture was not salvageable because of the extent of smoke damage.
Bruce has put thousands of dollars into home improvements and upgrades — from painting intricate designs on the bathroom walls to taking out walls in the living room to open up the space — and he and Donna are trying to preserve as much of it as possible.
“This is what is so upsetting, because we worked our tails off trying to make a nice home,” Bruce said.
Asked if he would consider taking legal action, Bruce said he had looked into it, but said it was too much of an ordeal for him and his wife.
Despite the strife, the Wetherholds and St Cyr say they feel lucky to have survived the ordeal.
And they now have some reason to hope that the home will finally be renovated or torn down: The redevelopment authority — which last month approved a resolution to merge with the city’s Community and Economic Development Department — closed on a sale this month with a private buyer who will refurbish or tear down the home, redevelopment authority board Vice President Jessica Lee Ortiz said.
“It could have been worse,” Donna Wetherhold said. “We could have lost the whole house, and everything in it.”