Four years ago, city building inspectors dragged the owners of the Paxton Hotel into Housing Court for code violations that included no fire alarm system.
Last September, they dismissed the case.
Changes in the building code meant that such a system no longer was required. The reason: City officials wanted to make it easier to operate single room occupancy hotels so that the homeless and other poor people would not lose a place to sleep on the cheap.
Now, following Tuesday’s deadly fire at the Paxton, the city’s priorities are likely to change again.
And transient hotels like the Paxton may again be required to have a fire alarm system.
After meeting with Mayor Richard Daley and other city officials, Building Commissioner Daniel Weil said Tuesday that more stringent codes might have to be enacted.
“He wants us to look at this and come up with some suggestions,” Weil said. “He feels this is unacceptable and indicates a need that we’ll have to tighten up regulations so this type of tragedy doesn’t happen again.
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“We don’t know whether a fire alarm system would have saved more lives, and we have to assume that it would,” he said.
Although the 1989 violation may now seem an ominous sign in the context of what occurred Tuesday, there were few indications that the Paxton Hotel was a building in trouble.
City officials and housing activists Tuesday had few negative words about Robert Berry, the man who apparently has been at the forefront of running the Paxton and the five other hotels.
“If you were asking me to put together a list of sleazy-type owners, he wouldn’t be on it,” said Douglas Dobmeyer, founder of Lakefront SRO Corp., a non-profit group that renovates buildings for the homeless.
“He doesn’t have that reputation,” he said. “He always seemed to be doing the right thing.”
Berry is president of Merryman Hotel Corp., the company that has a principal financial interest in the Paxton as well as in the Bel-Ray Hotel, 3150 N. Racine Ave.; the Wilson Windsor Apartments at 936 W. Wilson Ave. and the Hotel Elinor at 3216 N. Cicero Ave., which the firm also lists as its headquarters.
Those familiar with the Paxton say it was known for being the kind of place where residents would end up staying months instead of weeks. There was a sense of community there.
Still things were not always what they should be.
Tuesday’s tragedy was not the first time fire claimed a life at the Paxton. In the first week of a firefighters strike in 1980, a 36-year-old hotel resident died from burns he suffered in a fire started when he fell asleep while burning incense in his room.
The Paxton also has been cited for violations of the building code. But, according to records, the problems were eventually rectified.
Six years ago, the city took the Paxton to court for failing to provide smoke detectors throughout the building, for broken plaster, a leaky roof and for failing to rid the place of roaches. Three months later, city attorneys said the owners had complied.
The owners also were cited in November 1991 and ordered to recharge the fire extinguishersCity officials say it appears that the owners had complied.
But it is that violation back in 1989 about the fire alarm system that may now seem most troubling. Last Sept. 17, attorneys for the city went into court and asked that the case be dismissed.
As part of an overhaul of the regulations that were supposed to make it cheaper to run a single room occupancy hotel, the laws were loosened. Among the changes was an elimination of the law requiring SRO hotels to have fire alarms was eliminated.
“A lot of the community groups that represented the homeless and the SRO operators had come to us voicing concerns that a lot of the regulations against SROs were strident, and it was going to be difficult to keep them running if we were going to require that they have elaborate fire alarm systems,” said Andrea Brands, of the corporation counsel’s office.