Making progress on that dilapidated Virginia Street house

Today we are going to revisit the ailing house on Virginia Street in the Lakebottom area that we first visited last week.

As Dedicated Readers will recall, it is a house that’s sat vacant for a long while and then had a large tree blow over onto it during the microburst storm this year. That totaled the front porch, so someone called the city, who at first condemned it, but then reevaluated it and decided to try to locate the owner to get him or her to do something about it.

Then I called the city after a Concerned Reader called me. And I put it in the paper and asked folks if they knew anything about the family of the owners, who had died.

The former owner, Ed Wohlwender, must have known everybody in town. I can’t recall getting as many phone calls and emails on one subject. We already knew that Wohlwender had died long ago as had his widow some years later, and that the property, along with about a dozen other pieces in town, were held in a family trust.

What we didn’t know was who exactly was running the show. Well, with the help of a gentleman who doesn’t want his name in the paper, we nailed down who’s in charge and got that information to the city authorities. We’ll see where that leads us.

Then something interesting came up. One woman told me there’s a person interested in buying the property and tearing the house down, just because he’s tired of looking at it. Again, the person wants to remain anonymous.

(Why doesn’t he just wait for the city to condemn it and knock it down itself? Because that can take months, even years because of the backlog of condemned houses on the rolls.)

Then I got a call from another guy who is a friend of the Wohlwender family. They had seen my column and contacted him and asked him to go over and look at the place and assess it for them. He did.

“I told them I didn’t think it was worth anything,” he said.

“You don’t think it’s worth renovating?” I asked.

“You want to buy it?” he shot back.

“Well, no, but I think I know somebody who might,” I said.

“Tell him to call me and we’ll talk,” he said.

So I called the anonymous lady who told me about the anonymous man and asked her to give him the other anonymous man’s name and phone number.

So that’s where we stand now. The city is contacting the family to find out their intentions. And one anonymous man is contacting another anonymous man to see about possibly buying the eyesore and doing away with it.

And at some point in this saga, we’re going to be able to put a name in the paper besides Wohlwender.

This story was originally published December 18, 2016 at 8:43 PM with the headline "Making progress on that dilapidated Virginia Street house."