Quake May End Battle Over Fillmore Hotel : Aftermath: Historic home to low-income laborers was severely damaged. Owner may not be able to rebuild, pleasing redevelopment forces.

When the walls of the Fillmore Hotel peeled away and crumbled to the sidewalk, a long-running dispute between the owner of the historic building and city officials may have been jolted to an end.

As a pre-dawn earthquake gripped the two-story brick apartment house Jan. 17, dozens of farm workers fled the crumbling structure, abandoning everything they owned. The walls of the building collapsed, crushing a row of cars on the street below and fully exposing the one- and two-bedroom apartments.

“The walls were falling down all around me,” hotel resident Francisco Perez said. “We were waiting for the ceiling to fall in on top of us. We were waiting to die.”

The damage left more than 50 people homeless and confirmed the fears of city officials who had shut down the aging apartment house in 1987 after concluding that an earthquake had turned hairline fractures into inch-wide cracks.

“My gut feeling is that that building was never safe,” said Fillmore Fire Chief Pat Askren, noting that the building is now so severely damaged that it could be condemned. “We’re just lucky that no one was killed.”

Eric Marsh, who won a legal battle to reopen the 17-unit hotel he bought in 1986, said he intends to take a hard look at whether to try to rebuild the turn-of-the-century building, a longtime home to fieldworkers and other laborers.

“There is a lot of bigotry here,” Marsh said. “If I were to try to rebuild, I would meet so much resistance that it would probably not be worth it.”

If Marsh can’t rebuild, he concedes that it would mean the end of a hard-fought battle to keep the hotel open.

“This is a building that they have wanted closed for a long time,” said Marsh, who maintains that the 1987 earthquake was used as an excuse to try to rid the downtown area of the hotel and its low-income tenants. “Ultimately, they may have succeeded.”

The Fillmore Hotel has been trapped in the city’s struggle to boost its financial future by re-creating its past.

City officials have embarked on an ambitious redevelopment campaign aimed at rejuvenating the local economy by revitalizing the historic downtown business district. In recent years, the city has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into refurbishing the turn-of-the-century buildings that make up Fillmore’s business core.

Just days before the earthquake, the city was scheduled to push forward with the redevelopment effort along Main Street.

But the hotel had not been included in those plans, city officials say, even though it is on Main Street and was built in the early 1900s. Marsh said he believes that the hotel was excluded partly because of its stormy relationship with the city.

But he also contends that officials don’t want the hotel or its tenants in the downtown area.

City leaders and residents privately admit that the hotel’s demise would benefit the Main Street improvement project.

“It was considered unsafe years ago and it hasn’t been fixed,” said Dorothy Haase, executive director of the Fillmore Historical Museum and a member of a task force set up to guide downtown redevelopment efforts. “They should have never allowed the people to move back then.”

In October, 1987, city inspectors condemned the hotel a few days after a powerful earthquake, centered in Whittier, badly rattled the building.

Nine days later, officials served the mostly Spanish-speaking residents with bilingual evacuation notices and directed them to a Red Cross shelter. A few weeks later, Marsh filed a lawsuit charging that the evacuation discriminated against the 100 mostly Latino residents who live there.

In February, 1988, a Fillmore appeals board ruled that the building was not a hazard and that city officials erred when they ordered the evacuation.

The board, made up of building inspectors from neighboring cities, ruled that the apartments could be occupied if a sagging floor was bolstered, smoke detectors were installed and gas shut-off valves were placed on all appliances.

Marsh said he has spent nearly $100,000 on improvements, including a substantial amount on trying to earthquake-proof the masonry as much as possible.

“It didn’t fall down. Those walls fell out, which is what they are designed to do,” Marsh said. “I’m really pleased with the performance of that building.”

But there are others who are less than pleased.

“We reached a settlement, and it was supposed to be fixed so something like this wouldn’t happen,” Councilman Mike McMahan said. “It’s a wonder no one was killed.”

Nearly lost in the debate are the laborers and their families left homeless when the earthquake hit. City officials say they are working as quickly as possible to find housing for them.

In the meantime, the residents have not been allowed to return to the building. The hotel has been red-tagged, meaning that the building is unsafe and that re-entry may never be allowed.

“Everything we have is still in the apartment,” said Alvaro Reyes, who like many of the other hotel residents is staying at one of the emergency shelters set up in the city. “What are we going to do now?”