Assurances that work can begin on a permanent roof for the fire-damaged Woman’s Club of Wilmette as early as December and that the club is addressing neighbors’ safety and appearance concerns about the Greenleaf Avenue property were enough to convince Wilmette’s zoning board of appeals to grant the club a time extension on its rebuilding schedule.
All five attending zoning board members agreed Oct. 21 to grant a variation from Wilmette’s regular zoning reconstruction schedule policies, which normally require such work to start within 180 days after a building permit is granted.
Attorney Chris Canning, who represented the club before the board, said that although it intends to start roofing the collapsed structure as soon as possible, the permits have yet to be pulled because of the lengthy insurance adjustment process. The 180-day period after the Feb. 17 fire “ended around Aug. 17,” necessitating the request, Canning said.
Village community development employees said that no similar requests have been made in the past 15 years.
Canning said the club is actually further along in the rebuilding process, eight months after the fire, than the Wilmette Park District was in 2003, when its golf club building burned. The district didn’t pull permits until roughly 14 months after its fire, Canning said.
A zoning board endorsement, followed by approval at the village board’s Nov. 10 meeting, is important, Canning and architect Timm Martin said, because what remains of the original building must have a permanent roof over it as soon as possible in order to prevent permanent damage to the remaining foundations.
“We’re going to be building through the winter,” Martin said, although he added “we are probably several weeks away from being in a condition to go out for bids.”
Although they granted the variation, zoning board members closely questioned Canning and Martin about when reconstruction would actually begin, since the June 2016 date included in the variance request alarmed residents of the east Wilmette neighborhood in which the club building had been a historic landmark.
“In developing your timeline for construction, are you able now to say what extension limit you’re seeking?” board member William Merci asked Martin.
Residents sent letters and emails to the village, calling the fenced-in site at 930 Greenleaf an eyesore and stating that they did not want to wait until next June to see progress on the lot.
Several complained the fencing didn’t hide a lot overgrown with weeds and remnants of the broken building. That “reflects poorly on the owners of the property and the village of Wilmette, and negatively impacts property values,” neighbors Jim and Carol Braband said in an Oct. 19 email to the community development department.
Jim Braband was the sole neighbor to speak on Oct. 21, but several others pleaded by email for the zoning board to require the club to move its safety fence so that the sidewalk on the building’s west side was available to be used. Others asked that the chain-link fence be covered.
Canning told the board and a small audience that the June date was arbitrarily chosen so that the club doesn’t have to return to the board for further extensions. Martin said he was willing to commit to the June deadline, and that work on the permanent roof might actually start this December.
Braband said an Oct. 15 meeting that club representatives held with him and his wife as representatives of the neighbors helped improve communication with the club. The fence was moved away from the sidewalk hours before the zoning board meeting, he said. The grounds have since been cleared of some of the weeds, he said.
Zoning board member Bob Surman agreed with Canning that enclosing the fence could cut into traffic sight lines, and he suggested that the club instead put a large sign up indicating what its plans were, to assure neighbors and potential purchasers of property that the building was not abandoned.
Edie Rowell, the Woman’s Club’s membership co-chair and chair of the building committee, told the zoning board that the length of time it has taken the club to get an insurance appraisal and decide its future was “a very frustrating period for us.”
Ice from more than a million gallons of water poured onto the building didn’t thaw in the basement until March, Rowell said. Subsequently, club officials worked with an insurance adjuster and spent time getting necessary village and county permits before doing a so-called “surgical” demolition, removing debris while keeping the shell of the building intact, Rowell said.
That didn’t happen until July, after club members learned that the adjuster believed it would cost more to replace the building than to rebuild it. A Sept. 21 letter from the adjuster to the village estimates replacement costs at more than $2.6 million, as opposed to about $1.2 million to repair it. The club has worked on a new business model to help it survive and has hired Martin as architect, Rowell said.
“We wish them well. We think they’re up against a tough battle” to rebuild the club’s physical plant and maintain its operations, Braband said.
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“It’s encouraging to hear that enclosing the building will happen” relatively quickly, he said, adding that neighbors want to see commitment and progress on the project, changing it from what he called “a bit of Armageddon.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy