Meadowbrook management to rebuild on existing foundation

By Owen Boss

Staff Writer

NORTHAMPTON - Almost four months after a fire ripped through an apartment building at Meadowbrook Apartments, all that remains on site is the concrete foundation.

But, as preparations are made for a new building where the last one stood, management reports that all 22 displaced tenants have since found permanent housing.

Alexa Dailey, asset manager for Preservation of Affordable Housing Inc., the company that owns the complex, said that in the days following the April 13 blaze, finding housing for the tenants of Building 21 was their top priority.

"We wanted to find housing for the displaced tenants - that was the first thing we had to do before anything else," she said. "That was the most important thing to us."

Immediately following the fire, many of the building's tenants relied on Red Cross support and were temporarily relocated to the Clarion Hotel in Northampton, while management found other open apartments within the complex.

Along with the search for available housing, management kicked off a city-wide relief effort to replace the items families lost in the fire, in collaboration with several area businesses and the Northampton Survival Center.

Since that time, Dailey said, all of the residents have found new living quarters. Six were relocated to other units at Meadowbrook, four have moved into Northampton Housing Authority units and two families made living arrangements on their own.

Following a tour of the building by Building Commissioner Anthony Patillo, it was deemed structurally unsafe and was torn down to the foundation in June.

Dailey said plans are now in motion to rebuild the apartment building exactly as it was, only with some structural and safety modifications to bring it up to current building standards.

"We are in the process of working with a contractor, going through the code and making a plan to rebuild. It will most likely not be ready for occupancy until 2010," she said. "The reason it may take a while is that we have to replace a building that was built 30 years ago, and you have to have it up to today's code. You don't just snap your fingers and have something like that happen."

Required changes, Daily said, will include installing updated handicapped-accessible entrances and exits, sprinkler systems, and reconfiguring space available to emergency vehicles in the building's parking lot.

Although the company has already chosen a contractor for the project, Dailey said she doesn't expect construction to begin until sometime this winter.

"We are currently working internally on a timeline. We are looking at about a seven-month construction period once the plans have been approved, which will bring us into 2010," she said. "The insurance company has been very cooperative, and once we settle that, it is just a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's."

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com