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Mar. 13--ALBANY-- A back wall and large section of the roof collapsed Friday on the old Third Precinct police station at 222 N. Pearl St., a historic Beaux-Arts building designed by a noted architect and built in 1906 of red brick with glazed white terra-cotta ornamentation.
Nobody was injured, but further collapse is a concern and a fence is being put up around the structure to protect passersby, said Albany Fire Chief Robert Forezzi.
"It can't stay like it is. It needs immediate attention," Forezzi said. Firefighters were called at about 11:30 a.m. for a collapse at the long-abandoned and severely deteriorated two-story building. It's located a few blocks north of the Palace Theatre, near the intersection with Livingston Avenue.
The owner of the building, Alice Yip, has been notified repeatedly that the building was unstable and needed work to stabilize it, but nothing was done, Forezzi said. Yip will be issued an appearance ticket for court next week and she has until March 19 to hire an engineer and to outline plans for its stabilization, Forezzi said. "We're not fooling around anymore," he said.
An engineering consultant who works with the city made a partial inspection Friday, but much of the first floor had collapsed into the basement and whether it can be saved has not been determined, Forezzi said.
"It's a wonderful, amazing building and we're going to save it," said Susan Holland, executive director of Historic Albany Foundation.
Her organization is familiar with Yip, a 2003 University at Albany graduate and entrepreneur who owned Fusion Cafe in downtown Albany, which has since closed. Yip was also among a group of investors whose proposal for an Asian-themed plaza in Arbor Hill never materialized. Yip could not be reached for comment.
"I'm fed up with owners who hold onto these historic buildings as speculation and do nothing to take care of them," Holland said. The Third Precinct was listed on Historic Albany's most endangered list of properties in 2005. Holland said that Yip turned down several offers for the building from preservation-minded people associated with Historic Albany Association. Yip had the building on the market recently for $120,000, Holland said, which she considered overpriced given the costly renovations needed.
If Yip won't sell the building, Holland said she will encourage the city to take the property by eminent domain. "We've got to save this building. It has such great potential," she said.
The Third Precinct was designed by architect Walter Hunter Van Guysling, who was born in Albany in 1878. He trained as a draftsman under Capitol architect Isaac Perry and apprenticed for architect Marcus T. Reynolds. Among his designs are the R.B. Wing building and the Hudson Day Line ticket office, both on Broadway; Public School No. 14 on Trinity Place; and the Amsterdam Apartments on Chestnut Street. He worked in an eclectic Colonial Revival style and he was completing alterations to a house at 366 Hudson Ave. at the time of his death in 1927. He's described in a recently published book, "Architects in Albany," edited by Diana S. Waite.
The Third Precinct made an appearance in the 2005 novel, "Crazyladies of Pearl Street," by Trevanian, author of "The Eiger Sanction," whose true identity was Rodney Whitaker, confirmed after his death in 2005 at 74.
In the 1930s, Whitaker lived at 238 N. Pearl St., a few doors up from the police station, and he wrote of the place: "North Pearl Street was a typical slum of the first half of what would be called the American Century. Pearl Street was Irish. More precisely, it was bog Irish. With its noise, its squalor, its childhood rites and ordeals, the awkward rutting of its adolescents, and its shoals of dirty brats with runny noses, nits and impetigo playing their screaming games of kick-the-can or stickball, sassing icemen and pushcart vendors, blocking traffic and exchanging insults with truck drivers who wanted to get through."
Paul Grondahl can be reached at 454-5623 or by e-mail at [email protected].
