Walsh: Will fate eliminate the blight?
By Rebecca Walsh
Tribune Columnist
Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:08/28/2008 12:06:51 AM MDT
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_10321406
Good luck always seems to find Salt Lake City's parking lot kings - David Bernolfo and Stephen Bamberger.
Nine years ago, a squatter serendipitously set a fire that gutted the boarded-up historic South Temple apartment building the partners wanted to tear down. In 2003, wiring in a shoe repair shop next door sparked the first 5-alarm fire in the city in three decades.
Both buildings eventually were demolished. A dusty, fenced vacant lot still marks the spot five years later, grand plans for an office and commercial complex apparently shelved.
Now, the cousins and heirs to the state's first Democratic and only Jewish governor, railroad scion Simon Bamberger, have stumbled into the right place and the right time again:
Their parking lot behind the Peery Hotel is identified as a possible site for a downtown Broadway-style theater. In capital city leaders' rush to beat the suburbs to the swish of the curtain, Bamberger Investment and Exploration Co. might finally get permission to tear down the shuttered Zephyr Club.
It's positively Greek.
After five years of trying to get city permission to demolish the club, Bamberger Investment suddenly has leverage.
Mayor Ralph Becker says he will not agree to any quid pro quo. "I cannot imagine me - and I would have to approve this - signing off on a deal that would involve tearing down that building," Becker says. "Other folks can have another agenda, but that is not the city's agenda."
Bamberger and Bernolfo did not return my phone calls.
But I talked to them after the Roberta Apartments burned in 1999. They were getting a reputation for buying old buildings and letting them fall apart until frustrated city officials would give in and sign the demolition permit.
Even Bamberger and Bernolfo's Main Street office looked abandoned. When chided about that, they installed a faux gallery for mayoral portrait painter Galina Perova. They do business a few doors down from the now-vacant Salt Lake Tribune building.
David Bernolfo acknowledged at the time that he let the apartments decay. "I would not have bought it if I thought it was historic," he said. "Maybe we could have done more."
Since then, the parking lot partners have torn down several historic structures, including the Salt Lake Stamp building - in spite of the city's refusal to grant permission for yet another parking lot.
"It's going to be a dirt lot within a very few feet of Main Street," predicted their attorney at the time, Tony Rampton.
And that's what it is.
There are other Salt Lake City property owners holding on to blighted downtown eyesores, sometimes for decades, always promising to do something - when light rail construction ends, after the Olympics, when the economy is better. The excuse du jour is the City Creek Center. Once the LDS Church's housing and shopping complex opens, Main Street is supposed to come to life.
But Bernolfo and Bamberger are different. Rather than building things, they tear things down, replacing brick with asphalt. Together and individually, they own properties in various states of repair on Post Office Place, Broadway and California Ave. - including the vacant Club Naked building on West Temple. Members of the family also own the property condemned by the federal government to create a spot for the historic Oddfellows Building and clear the way for a new U.S. courthouse.
"We have too much vacant property downtown," says the mayor. "We have folks who are landbanking. And in the meantime, we have these large parcels of ground where nothing is happening."
Because the city is in negotiations with Bamberger, no current nor former city officials wanted to talk. Those who have met with Bernolfo say he considers his surface parking lots a boon to the city. Eventually, he hopes to build condo towers on the Zephyr block.
Meantime, Salt Lake City Weekly Associate Editor Bill Frost documents the Zephyr's weather-beaten exterior with a weekly photo, as in: "Dead Zephyr - Week 249."
"It just kind of made me depressed," Frost says. "I decided to share my depression with the world. It really pisses a lot of people off."
Bernolfo and Bamberger seem immune to the disgust of a city. Their strategy seems to be: If you wait long enough, the fates will intervene.
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