A hazard or an excuse?

I SPENT PART OF THURSDAY morning online, shopping for a hazmat suit to keep me from harm in a City Hall records room.

Would a used suit do the trick, like the simple $8.95 model offered by a Midwest recycler of protective clothing? It came with a hood and boots, sure, but what if I needed a more hard-core barrier between me and danger? I decided to go with a $900 "Breaking Bad" get-up, complete with goggles and breathing mask.

Before I could convince my boss to pay for it (as if . . . ), the phone rang. It was a City Hall official with good news. The records I'd inquired about had been located. So I no longer needed to risk my life for a citizen named Benjamin Picker, who'd asked for my help last week.

He's a Radnor attorney and genealogy buff who'd contacted Philadelphia Orphans Court with a request for two sets of estates records from the 1920s. He was told in an email from attorney Caren Berger, the court's deputy in charge of litigation, that records for one ancestor had been located.

But those of the second, she wrote, were located "in an area of City Hall which is inaccessible due to its hazardous condition; accordingly, we are unable to retrieve this file."

Picker had been given the same answer a year before by a different employee, so this time he wanted clarification.

He called Berger and says they had an odd conversation (Berger didn't comment for this column). The record room was on the ninth floor of City Hall. Since City Hall elevators only went to the seventh floor, someone would need to climb two remote flights of stairs and then use a ladder in the dusty, unventilated old room to find and pull the records.

Which sounded to Picker not like a hazardous activity but like a pain-in-the-ass task no one felt like doing. He was concerned that the public was being denied access to important historical and genealogical documents for specious reasons.

I told him I'd check it out because, seriously, I really wanted to wear a hazmat suit. But first I wanted to eyeball the alleged hazards.

That's how I came to be in Room 975 of City Hall, a huge records area at the top of a very dusty staircase. Its modest center office was manned by a lone clerk who very pleasantly told me that, no, there was nothing hazardous at all about his surroundings. He was listening to a radio as he tapped away at a computer, and the office was awash in sunshine from one of City Hall's beautiful arched windows.

On my way out, I snuck into one of Room 975's dark, cavernous storage areas for my own look-see. How cut off from the world did I feel in that silent crypt?

Put it this way: If I ever kill someone, I'll know where to hide the body.

Boxes littered the floor, and mile-long shelves held files stacked so high they disappeared into the darkness above me. As my eyes adjusted, though, I saw a hunk of ceiling hanging perilously over my head. I wandered around and the more hanging hunks and gaping holes I saw (and, wait, was that mold?) the quicker I wanted outta there.

In other words, it seemed kind of hazardous.

Except, guess what? I was in the wrong place. If I hadn't been so excited about play-acting at "Real Detective," I would've seen the sign outside the door that read "Office of the Prothonotary Older Records Unit."

My bad.

Anyway, let me get to the good part of this story, which started when I met Damian Bianculli and Guy Sabelli, who gave me a tour of the correct room - 925 - which was closed and locked tight, right across the hall from the police-evidence storage area. Register of Wills Ron Donatucci (Orphans Court falls under his purview) put me in touch with the guys, who he said, "will take great care of you."

Bianculli is the coordinator of marriage records in the Register of Wills Office and Sabelli is the assistant chief of Orphans Court. And they are possibly the nicest City Hall employees I've ever met, the kind who are actually excited to be helpful (unlike some civil servants I've met, who are neither civil nor servile, but that's for another column).

They happily explained that, last year alone, their department moved 500 boxes of old records out of Room 925 and transported them across town to the Philadelphia City Archives, which houses records not in current use (some date back to the 1600s, so there are lots of "thees" and "thous" in those files). The goal is to house at City Hall only those records that date back five years.

Over the last few months, Bianculli has overseen the packaging of another 200 boxes, with staffers coming in on weekends to do the work (in return for comp days, not overtime).

"It was hot, hard work," said Bianculli. "We hand carried the boxes down two flights of stairs to get them to the elevator. It took us a few weekends to get it done."

A window was open in room 925 as we spoke, but the place was still a stuffy hotbox. Nevertheless, it was paradise compared to its condition last year, said Sabelli. Pigeons had invaded through a broken window and roosted atop its shelves. Bird poop was everywhere.

"Damian and the guys spent hours scrubbing it off the shelves," Sabelli told me.

The historic papers that remain in room 925 are terribly fragile and densely packed into ancient metal filing boxes on shelves that stretch about 9-feet high. I opened one drawer to inspect a 1904 decree regarding one Rosanna Huttenbrauch, but was afraid to touch it lest it crumble, scattering bits of Huttenbrauch's legacy all over the floor.

"Our goal is to preserve and restore the records, but no one really wants to pay for that when we're always looking for money to keep libraries open," says Donatucci, who regularly applies for grants to fund proper record storage. In the past, his office has also received aid and manual assistance from both the Mormon Church and Ancestry.com, the online genealogy site. "But the city's history is important, too. So it's a balancing act."

Within a day of my call to Donatucci's office to ask how Benjamin Picker might find the ancestral records he needed, Picker was contacted by Donatucci's chief deputy, Alba Collazo. While the original documents Picker requested were not readily available, Collazo said, staff was able to locate later records that referenced them.

Problem solved. Picker was delighted.

"I don't want people to think I was complaining," he says. "Everyone in Orphan's Court was really, really nice and seemed like they wanted to help. But something wasn't adding up. I didn't know what else to do" except contact the press.

Donatucci apologized for the delay but also defended attorney Caren Berger.

"That storage room, you saw it," he said. "It's dirty and unventilated. It's boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. Caren just wanted to protect my staff. Lawyers are always going to err on the side of caution."

All is forgiven, Ms. Berger.

But I'm still bummed I didn't get to buy that hazmat suit. It would've made a helluva Halloween costume.

Email: polaner@phillynews.com

Phone: 215-854-2217

On Twitter: @RonniePhilly

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