Displaced Heritage House Tenants Are on the Move Again

For the third time in three weeks, Garnetta Finger boarded a bus Tuesday and rode to a motel intended to be her temporary home.

But almost as soon as she unpacked her suitcases in the one-room apartment she was given at the Cozy Suites motel, in the Central West End, Finger clamored for new accommodations.

”We’re not going to be here because we’re going to our damn lawyer’s office because this is unacceptable,” Finger, 59, declared to a small ring of friends gathered in front of the motel’s front entrance.

”This is not acceptable for us,” Finger, a truck driver by trade, continued. “It’s like a military dorm room.” Other residents spoke of accessibility issues and the spartan nature of the accomodations.

Finger’s life has been a series of disappointments and disruptions since the fateful night of January 15, when water pipes at the Heritage House Apartments, 2800 Olive Street, froze and burst, causing floods that led to the 18-story high-rise’s condemnation a day later. 

More than 200 tenants were evacuated. Most were taken to the Ballpark Hilton, where they stayed a week, then 120 evacuees were moved to the Hilton St. Louis Airport.

The office of St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones announced this past weekend the evacuees would be moved beginning Tuesday to three hotels in St. Louis, including the Cozy Suites, and could stay there through February 29. Money for the accommodations would come from a mix of private and public funds.

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MIKE FITZGERALD

The Cozy Suites saw an influx of new residents — and then a departure.

But then, on Tuesday afternoon, about two hours after evacuees had unpacked their bags at Cozy Suites, a Jones spokesman announced a change of plans: the people being put up at Cozy Suites would be moved to two other hotels, the Element and the Angad Arts Hotel.

“We found that that hotel didn’t have accommodations that were needed for the residents of Heritage House,” says Conner Kerrigan, the mayor’s communications director.

For residents like Finger, it was just one more transition in a period that’s had many. But Finger’s anxieties go far beyond needing a place to lay her head tonight. What’s really stressing her out, she says, is the fact that no one can explain to her the fate of her furniture and other important possessions, which are trapped in the condemned high-rise.

”I have my mother’s ashes up there. Heirlooms,” Finger said. “My passport. My Social Security card. All my stuff. Everything.”

During a meeting yesterday at the airport Hilton, Bluesky Restoration explained that the residents’ furniture would be packed up and sanitized, and then taken to a new undisclosed location, according to tenants interviewed.

Glenn Anderson, 78, a Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, said Bluesky told him his furniture would stay at Heritage House “until I find my new apartment. That’s what they said. But they’ve said a lot of things.”

On Monday, Finger and four other Heritage House evacuees filed a lawsuit in state court against Heritage House, Sansone Group LLC, the property manager, and other defendants. 

The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accuses the defendants of breach of contract, wrongful termination and other misdeeds.

Finger says she has no doubt she and the other tenants will prevail in the lawsuit.

”But the thing of it is,” she says, “why do we have to go through all this?”