Owners forced to pay for fixes.
ST. LOUIS - On the morning of July 18, Fred Lewis got a call from a friend who happened to be near Lewis' building on Martin Luther King Drive. Someone was breaking in. For more than 20 years, Lewis has owned the former J.C. Penney store near the city's border with Wellston.
The previous owners all but gave it to him, weary from maintaining a building designed for a tenant that had departed as the neighborhood declined. The three-story concrete building, constructed in 1948 in the International Style and on the National Register of Historic Places, is a testament to long-ago days when the Wellston Loop was a bustling streetcar hub and a major regional shopping center.
Though it's now in one of the city's roughest neighborhoods, Lewis insists no one had ever broken in - until this year. And the intruder wasn't a scrapper or an addict. It was a contractor working for the city. "I've been here 22 years," Lewis said from the sidewalk that afternoon as he sized up the damage to his door "I've never had an incident. Ever. Until the city came in." Now, the city has a tax lien recorded against his building for a repair contract that had been estimated at $163,000, even though repair work hasn't even started.
