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Inquirer editorial: Richard Basciano doesn't blame himself for the collapse of a building he owned

Between Richard Basciano's shirking of responsibility for the deadly 2013 Center City building collapse and his long-standing ownership of said building lies a logical tension. It reaches its breaking point when this Ozymandias of pornography and blight is confronted with testimony that he was standing before his own dreary expanse of Market Street when his partly demolished building crushed a busy thrift store next door, killing six and injuring 13.

Between Richard Basciano's shirking of responsibility for the deadly 2013 Center City building collapse and his long-standing ownership of said building lies a logical tension. It reaches its breaking point when this Ozymandias of pornography and blight is confronted with testimony that he was standing before his own dreary expanse of Market Street when his partly demolished building crushed a busy thrift store next door, killing six and injuring 13.

While Basciano and his wife were indeed at the site, he claims in a deposition that he didn't see or hear the collapse. His alibi? He had to go to the bathroom. "It was an emergency," he told the lawyers deposing him for a lawsuit brought by collapse victims. Basciano, now 90, says that and another supposedly urgent matter - an appointment with his ophthalmologist - kept him from so much as looking at the very real emergency that his disastrous demolition had wrought before scurrying off.

Made public in the aftermath of the conviction of demolition contractor Griffin Campbell - in a prosecution that left Basciano unscathed - and detailed by the Inquirer's Joseph A. Slobodzian, the deposition finds the landlord dodging the implications of the collapse in every direction, casting blame on his architect, his contractor, his consigliere.

Basciano even goes after the Salvation Army for failing to yield to his plan to finally redevelop the block, questioning the thrift store's "noncompliance" with his wishes and "the millions of dollars they do in retail." It's some spectacle: The man who imposed blight and smut on the neighborhood for decades taking pointed issue with one of its isolated examples of respectable business - conducted for charity, no less.

Basciano apparently still takes pride in his ancient boxing career: He notes that he shadowboxed on the morning of the collapse, and Inquirer file photographs capture him striking absurd pugilistic poses. But he doesn't sound so tough blaming everyone else for what happened on a neglected property he owned during a cut-rate demolition he ordered.

It's not that the deposition finds Basciano without pity in the wake of the collapse. He has plenty, in fact, for himself, particularly his dashed "dream" of a Market Street redevelopment that could somehow sweeten his legacy of wholesale urban putrefaction. As it turned out, the collapse represented that legacy's terrible culmination.

Basciano is not the first of his ilk - he inherited his local portfolio from a similarly inclined blight baron - and he won't be the last. Philadelphia's greater problem is that such characters run roughshod over its code and tax enforcement, and that the halting reforms of the past three years probably haven't prepared the city for another landlord like Richard Basciano.