and again.
On March 4, 1987, at 9:20 a.m., a fire broke out at the Roosevelt Warehouse. It spread rapidly through stacks of books on the third floor. More than 100 firefighters spent hours dousing the flames with thousands of gallons of water, but the building was effectively destroyed. At the time, school officials measured the damage at “several million dollars for the contents alone.” According to Reginald Ciokajlo, then superintendent of support services, the district was lucky that most of that year’s textbooks and materials had already been delivered and none of the principals had placed their orders for the next school year’s textbooks. School and student records going back to 1918 were destroyed. Many books and supplies that hadn’t been reduced to ash sustained fire or water damage. None of the 75 employees in the warehouse at the time of the fire were injured, though just weeks before they had complained to the fire department that exit doors had been chained and locked to prevent recurring thefts from the warehouse.
New learning standards like those adopted under programs like No Child Left Behind can make perfectly usable textbooks obsolete. The cutting of art, music, and athletic programs can also make existing supplies unnecessary. There was undoubtedly some failure to salvage perfectly-usable materials after the fire. Who, exactly, was responsible for that failure has never been determined and s/he has never been held accountable. All that is clear now is that thousands of books were devoured by a fire; their ashes on the third floor created a polluted soil suitable for trees to grow thirty feet up through a gaping hole left by the skylights that collapsed in the heat of the flames. Books and supplies that did not burn were certainly damaged by the thousands of gallons of water that had been used to extinguish the blaze. Other books and supplies were, in 1990, apparently still usable in the eyes of one Free Press reporter. And at some point during the 1990s, the heavily-damaged building and its contents were sold “as-is” to the reclusive self-made billionaire Manuel “Matty” Moroun. I haven’t been able to determine from public records when exactly Moroun took title to this property—-Moroun uses holding companies to mask his real estate dealings—-nor have I been able to determine who owned the property at the time of the sale. In 1997 the building went on the list kept by the City of Detroit’s Buildings & Safety Engineering Department for buildings slated for demolition.
