Clean Up

Waterbury had a couple of dramatic building collapses this winter, when all our roofs were weighed down by many feet of snow and ice. The biggest collapse was the old Sena's Duckpin Bowling building on North Main Street. Sena's sold the building in 2001 to Iglesia Pentecostal El Tabernaculo, Inc. (the linked article above states that the church is co-pastored by Denis A. Cuevas, general manager of the city's Water Pollution Control Department).

As far as I can tell, it has been sitting vacant ever since Sena's closed in 2000.

The city (I assume it was the city) did a great job cleaning up the Sena's wreckage. Every last scrap of the building was removed, the basement was filled in, and the whole thing was covered with wood chips. Very impressive.

It's too bad the giant, hazardous, abandoned and blighted buildings on the corner of Walnut and Wood Streets didn't collapse, since that's apparently the best way to get them torn down.

A few days after the Sena's collapse, a section of wall from the old clock factory on North Elm Street collapsed. It still hasn't been cleaned up. The pile of bricks are blocking the sidewalk and spilling out into the street. It's been sitting there so long the yellow caution tape is almost gone.

I'm left wondering why the city can't get a small pile of rubble blocking a sidewalk and part of the roadway cleaned up in a timely fashion. It's relatively small, but it's still a big problem.