A day after the Christmas Day blaze that left dozens homeless, the city of Minneapolis used its emergency authority early Thursday to order the demolition of part of the Francis Drake Hotel.
Fire crews finally vanquished the blaze at 416 S. 10th St. midday Thursday, the Minneapolis Fire Department announced in a tweet. About 120 people evacuated from the Drake, a once luxury hotel that in recent years served as an emergency shelter for the homeless, spent the night on cots in the assembly hall at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Half are children.
They will have three meals a day at the church through Saturday. The Red Cross has identified three other shelter facilities that can house the displaced families, and will start moving them Saturday, a Red Cross official said.
“Everyone is much calmer than I would be in this kind of crisis. I mean, there are people here who lost everything - and that’s a huge blow,” said Scott Brueske, director of properties at Bethlehem Baptist Church.
About noon Thursday, children at the shelter were still running around in their pajamas, filled with nervous energy.
“This persistent homelessness and the issue of housing becomes starkly real here,” said Gov. Tim Walz, after walking amid the sleeping cots and talking to displaced residents at the Bethlehem Baptist Church. “We knew it was out there. It’s always around us. But a lot of times, without these tragedies, it may not come home to people the same way.”
People at the church have been asking when they can return to the Drake Hotel to get their belongings left behind in the fire.
But the eastern half of the Drake is too dangerous to leave standing, according to the city.
Minneapolis Community Planning and Economic Development Director David Frank said he was on the site with others from the city and made the determination for a partial demolition based on what they could see from the outside.
The U-shaped building’s opening faces south toward Interstate 35W where thousands of cars enter downtown every day. The eastern and western wings are joined by a shorter connector building on the northern side.
The eastern roof of the three-story building collapsed during the fire, and then the third floor collapsed onto the second. Now the second floor is full of water and debris, causing the walls to bow out with bricks being pushed loose from the wall.
“The water is looking for a way out,” Frank said Thursday, adding “There’s extra load where it’s not supposed to be.”
Given the danger to the public — who will soon be walking and driving past — the right thing is to take down that portion of the building, Frank said.
“We would love to save as much of the building as possible, but the safety of the public is the primary concern,” he said.
The eastern building is in such a precarious state that no one was able to enter Thursday morning, Frank said. However, the city leaders also believe the connector piece and the western portion of the Drake don’t need to be demolished. What happens to the rest of the building will be determined by the property owner, Frank said.
The building is owned by Minneapolis-based Leamington Co., according to Hennepin County property records. State filings list its chief executive officer as Brian P. Short. Messages left at numbers listed for Short and the company were not immediately returned.
Firefighters worked throughout the night to extinguish the last of the blaze.
“Right now, we believe it is totally out,” Bryan Tyner, Assistant Minneapolis Fire Chief, said late Thursday morning.
He said the department will continue to monitor the building for any hot spots.
It’s still unclear what caused the fire. Investigators from the city and the State Fire Marshal’s office finished their on-scene work just before 1 p.m. Thursday Fire Chief John Fruetel said he expects investigators to release a formal report in a few days.
Tyner said the building had fire alarms, which appeared to have been working. One was still beeping Thursday morning.
Firefighters were preparing to leave and turn the building over to its owner. Utility companies had arrived to check the building before the partial demolition.
Under state law, the State Fire Marshal Division is required to inspect the hotel every three years. The most recent inspection, conducted on Nov. 9, 2018, found eight code violations, according to the report filed by the inspector. The inspector ordered the building owner to remove obstructions blocking exits, display evacuation diagrams in guest rooms, ensure sprinkler systems were installed correctly in required areas and repair electrical hazards.
When the inspector returned for a follow-up in June, all of those violations had been fixed, said Jen Longaecker, spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
Many people displaced by the fire expressed their frustration and bitterness over conditions at the Drake Hotel, which one resident described as “subhuman.”
Dominique Howell, 32, who was displaced on Christmas and just discovered this week that she is pregnant, said she and her boyfriend moved into the Drake a year and a half ago because they were told it was “affordable and safe.”
She said there were cockroaches in the kitchen, mice that scratched and scurried in the walls at night, and water that ran brown from the faucets. The roof of the lobby leaked. Even so, Howell said, she paid a monthly rent of $860 a month, which is most of what she earns as a cook at a local restaurant.
Howell said she had been trying to find another apartment for more than a year, but had been repeatedly turned down because of her low income and poor credit score.
“That place was so rundown it should have been condemned years ago,” she said. “It was not fit for human habitation.”
Gov. Walz said he received a telephone call from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey at 5 a.m. on Christmas Day, to discuss how they would begin a coordinated response to the fire and find housing for the displaced residents of the Drake Hotel.
The Governor spoke after visiting Bethlehem Baptist Church Thursday afternoon. Walz said that a “major part” of his administration’s bonding request to the Legislature next year will be focused on housing. “Housing is our absolute top priority,” he said.
Last week, Walz announced nearly $5 million in new investments to expand emergency shelter capacity across the state. The money would be dispersed through a public-private fund, known as the Minnesota Homeless Fund, that included donations from private foundations, corporations and tribal organizations. The new funds would be deployed immediately, Walz said, to open up hundreds of shelter beds across the state.
“This is exactly the type of situation that we envisioned for some of that” emergency shelter fund, Walz said. “I think none of us expected this quickly to see a shrinking of a major portion of those beds. So this just exacerbates an already existing problem.”
This is a developing story. Check startribune.com for updates.
Staff writer Liz Navratil contributed to this report.
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