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L&I Panty Raid at Post Bros. Goldtex Building

L&I stops a rooftop preview party at the new Goldtex apartment building because the developers failed to obtain a certificate of occupancy.

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The Pestronk brothers, who are slowly completing the conversion of the Goldtex building in the Loft District after an eight-month-long union stand-off, wanted to get noticed when they sent out "VIP" invitations Thursday to a rooftop preview party for their new apartments. And they certainly did. Just not in the way they intended.

But at 2:30 p.m. Thursday – three-and-a-half hours after the invitations began popping up and popping eyeballs – someone quietly filed a complaint with the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections pointing out that the Goldtex building at 12th and Pearl Streets (just north of Vine Street) lacked a certificate of occupancy. No small matter when you're planning to bring a gang of folks to the top of a 10 story building.

L&I inspectors told the Pestronks, no rooftop party. But they said they could apply for a special event permit, like the kind the FringeArts festival uses when it holds events in abandoned buildings. The real estate barons declined. Instead, they moved the party to an outdoor courtyard on the ground floor. No fines were issued since they fixed the problem by not holding the party on the roof, said L&I spokesperson Maura Kennedy.

I asked Kennedy who had filed the compaint, but she said L&I has a policy of not disclosing names. But I couldn't help noting that the first person to sound the alarm was Frank Keel, the official PR guy for the Building Trades Council, whose triumphant email arrived in my inbox at 8:37 p.m. L&I "showed up" before the VIP party and "shut it down," Keel's email chortled. In a telephone interview, all he would own up to was that, "concerned citizens who have been by there, and seen the incomplete state of the building, reached out to L&I."

Keel said it was clear that the apartment conversion still has a long way to go. Warming to the same theme, Building Trades Business Manager Pat Gillespie claimed, "That clap-trap apartment building is nowhere near ready for occupancy, that's why they've only been showing the model apartment under the cover of darkness, so potential renters won't see the true, unfinished condition of the building."

The normally voluble Pestronk brothers could not be reached for comment today. Perhaps they were sleeping off the after-effects of the party.