Germantown neighbors want blight court to force repairs to 10-year eyesore house

WHEN MAYOR NUTTER recently announced his aggressive push to prosecute deadbeats whose blighted vacant properties ruin residential blocks, Julie Baranauskas and her long-suffering neighbors were startled to hear that Municipal Judge Bradley K. Moss is presiding over the city's new blight court.

"That's the same judge who has had the city's case against Tony Byrne since March," Baranauskas told the Daily News, talking about the owner of the severely blighted, 6,251-square-foot, 19th-century stone house next to hers that has plagued the jewel-like 5300 block of Knox Street in Germantown for 10 years.

"The neighbors have told Judge Moss how that house has been ruining our block and our property values," Baranauskas said. "We've shown him photos of the extreme blight there. We keep going to hearings. But nothing's changed.

"And this is the judge who's supposed to force owners like Byrne to fix up their properties or sell them? I'll believe it when I see it."

Meanwhile, what Baranauskas has seen every day for the past decade is Byrne's deserted, 11-bedroom mini-mansion with its broken and missing windows, piles of stone and wood rubble where the porch used to be, a huge cemented bay window, and the haunted look of death by decay.

Byrne's house - which dominates the corner of Knox and Coulter streets, and casts a pall over Germantown's gracious Penn-Knox neighborhood - should be the poster child for the tough new Department of Licenses & Inspections anti-blight program, which hauls absentee owners like Byrne before Judge Moss, who can fine them $300 per day for each window and each door that is not up to code.

In Byrne's case, that fine would be thousands per day.

L&I has targeted 23,058 blighted properties and, thanks to a recent state law, can now go after the absentee owners' personal assets to pay the staggering fines for noncompliance - or force the properties into sheriff's sale.

L&I's new muscle is supposed to wipe away years of deadbeat vacant property owners playing the court system for a fool while their blighted houses continue to bring down otherwise-fine residential city blocks that are at least 80 percent occupied.

But will it?

That depends on the judge. Although Moss has imposed more than $100,000 in fines on absentee owners of blighted properties during the court's first three months, he has used the carrot, not the stick, so far with Byrne.

When L&I Commissioner Fran Burns announced the anti-blight program last month, she said, "This is no longer a city where you can abandon your property and allow it to become blighted. We will make it very expensive for you if you do."

And Nutter said, "Philadelphia residents should not have to put up with this kind of crap."

But Baranauskas and her neighbors, who have put up with this kind of crap for a decade, know from sad experience what Nutter and Burns didn't say.

L&I can track down absentee deadbeats, threaten their personal assets and compel them to show up in court - but if the judge allows a blight perp to tap-dance his way out of it, the case can drag on month after month, hearing after hearing, as Byrne's has for 10 years.

Grace Flisser, a neighbor on nearby Penn Street, told the Daily News, "I wish that Mayor Nutter would take a walk down Knox and Coulter one day. He'd be appalled."

In an emailed response to questions about the new L&I program and why Byrne still owns his grotesquely-blighted house, Moss said he couldn't comment on active cases and suggested that the questions "are best and more appropriately answered by others, such as the parties."

The city's lawyer declined to comment and Byrne's attorney did not return phone calls. But other sources familiar with the case said the judge is treating Byrne with kid gloves - deeming the repair of a couple of windows progress while many remain broken - because the case has stagnated for a decade, and glacial progress seems to be the only kind of progress that Byrne is willing to make.

But while the judge and the city attorney appear to accept Byrne's excruciatingly slow pace as the elephant in the courtroom, the Knox Street neighbors are frustrated and angry.

James Bishop, a 38-year resident who can see the blighted Byrne house from his yard, said, "Byrne will never bring this house back to good repair. All we want is for the city to say 'No' to this man, and fine him to the point where he has to sell the house to someone who will bring it back to code and its former beauty.

"There are laws that should protect the neighbors from this kind of property disaster. Why does this creep win?"

Baranauskas, Byrne's next-door neighbor, took this reporter into her yard to point out the rotted wood along the underside of Byrne's roof, and the French doors on a second-floor balcony that are permanently flung open to the elements and the critters.

"If you're here in the morning or evening, you'll have squirrels and raccoons wave to you," she said wearily. "I know what you're thinking. Was I a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic to buy my house?"

No, she said. When she moved in 15 years ago, Byrne was living in his house. "Clearly, Martha Stewart had not been by to decorate," Baranauskas said, "but it had curtains and shades, the windows worked, the porch was beautiful - its wooden ceiling looked like the keel of a ship."

But Byrne didn't repair his drain pipes, and during a heavy rain 10 years ago, water poured directly off his massive mansard roof onto his porch, bringing it "tumbling down with a tremendous crash," Baranauskas said.

Although L&I carted off some of the wreckage, piles of porch debris remain in Byrne's front yard.

By the winter of 2003, Byrne's house was in such bad shape that L&I cleaned and sealed it. The city shut the water off, but somebody turned it back on. Pipes burst on an upper floor, sending water cascading down the stairway, flooding his basement, and seeping through the shared wall between his house and hers, Baranauskas said.

On a recent visit to the Penn-Knox neighborhood, this Daily News reporter chanced upon Anthony Byrne - who lives in Wyndmoor where he owns and publishes the "Irish Edition" newspaper - making a rare visit to his long-abandoned Knox Street house.

Byrne has somehow managed to survive four city lawsuits since 2001, keep his gigantic nuisance house, and continue to let it rot.

He makes small repairs before his court dates, and a succession of municipal judges have called that "progress" and given him a free pass until the next hearing.

He prepared for his late-November court date by replacing three windows. Moss gave him until Jan. the 24, 2012, blight court to rebuild the porch, clear the debris in his yard and replace more windows.

But will he? Or will he do just enough to buy more time while his blighted house continues to hold the block hostage?

Dressed in worn jeans and a long-sleeved red shirt, Byrne was puttering around his yard, picking up pieces of broken red brick, carrying them several feet to a spot near where his front gate used to be but had been replaced by a filthy mattress, and dropping them into a pile near the larger piles of porch debris.

Byrne said "the savages" who pass by pick bricks out of his sidewalk and throw them at his house, breaking windows.

When asked why he hasn't repaired his house or sold it to someone who will, Byrne railed against a neighbor - not Baranauskas - whom he said has been criticizing him for years, "peeping in my windows through binoculars," turning other neighbors against him.

"I've owned this house for 37 years," Byrne said. "But she's so intolerable, I moved out years ago. I won't sell it because of that crazy b----. I keep it just to piss her off."

Byrne leaned on his weather-beaten wrought iron fence and smiled joylessly. "Maybe I'll paint this red, white and blue because I'm patriotic," he said, looking defiantly toward the lovingly maintained house of the neighbor he lives to anger. "I'm sure she'll love that. Or maybe orange."