Staying safe at Garden City Towers

The seven-story building is home to some of the city's most vulnerable residents. After decades of concern about fire, a major step is about to be taken.

The Garden City Towers is one of those places you drive by a lot but probably don’t think much about, even though, at seven stories, it’s one of the tallest buildings, if not the tallest, in the city.

But I started thinking about the place a few weeks ago when the City Council approved funding to install a fire sprinkler system in the building.

Garden City Towers, at 20 Sohier Road, is home to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. The building, which is owned and operated by the Beverly Housing Authority, has 100 apartments for low-income people who are elderly or disabled. Many of them use walkers or wheelchairs.

I guess it should come as no surprise that the building does not have sprinklers. It was built in 1974, when sprinklers weren’t required. That’s always worried people, but apparently not enough to prompt a plan to install them at any time over the last half-century.

That changed last year when a fire at an assisted-living facility in Fall River in July killed 10 residents. The tragedy caught the attention of both the Beverly Housing Authority board of commissioners and Beverly Fire Chief Pete O’Connor.

“We’d been talking about the need for sprinkler systems in the individual rooms (at Garden City Towers) for some time,” said Nancy Marino, one of the commission members. “It was always kind of there. After that fire in Fall River it really brought it to the fore for us.”

O’Connor was thinking the same thing. In October, he wrote letters to the owners of two buildings in Beverly that have always worried him — the Fairweather Apartments on Elliott Street, and the Garden City Towers.

In the letter, O’Connor said Garden City Towers was identified by the fire department as a “target hazard because of its size, population, and inherent challenges associated with quickly getting water on a fire in its incipient stages.”

“We all know it,” O’Connor told me regarding concerns over fire safety in those buildings. “But (after the Fall River fire), it was like, ‘It’s been going on long enough.’ I may not have leverage code-wise, but there’s a bigger picture.”

(I reached out to the owners of the Fairweather Apartments but haven’t heard back.)

I asked O’Connor how many fires there have been at Garden City Towers over the years and he quickly looked it up. He said there have been six “small fires” dating back to 2006, when the fire department started digitizing its records.

The fires have been caused by things like careless disposal of smoking materials or leaving something unattended on a stove. O’Connor said some of the fires were enough to evacuate residents from certain floors, but not the entire building.

“We’ve been very fortunate,” he said.

Of course, getting 100-plus elderly and disabled people out of the building would be a huge challenge, especially since you can’t use elevators during a fire. To make matters worse, the BHA said in its application for CPA money that the current hose system in the building, which involves connecting fire hoses to standpipes on each floor, “is old and obsolete and would probably not be of any help in the instance of fire today.”

O’Connor said automatic fire sprinklers would keep the fire in check and reduce the amount of smoke.

“It’s not going to eliminate the problem but it’s going to make it way safer for the residents and less of a challenge for us,” he told me.

In its application, the BHA quoted state fire officials as saying that a multi-fatality fire is “extraordinarily rare” if a building has an automatic sprinkler system.

“Ultimately,” O’Connor said, “sprinklers do save lives.”

The big obstacle to installing a comprehensive fire protection sprinkler system, of course, is the cost. The Beverly Housing Authority, which is separate from the city, applied to the city’s Community Preservation Committee for money to help pay for the project. The CPC reviews and approves which projects get funding from the Community Preservation Act fund, which comes from a 1% surcharge on property taxes. The City Council has final approval on which projects get funded.

The bottom line is the CPA will pay $1.3 million toward the sprinkler system, while the Beverly Housing Authority will spend almost $700,000 from two years of capital fund money it receives from the federal government. Total cost: $2 million.

The system will carry water from a fire pump in the basement through the existing standpipes to all common areas throughout the seven floors and into the individual units, according to BHA’s application.

Bruce McCarrier, BHA’s executive director, and Brian Silva, the director of maintenance, gave me a tour of the building and noted that a lot of work has been done there over the years, including a new roof, new elevators and new boilers. There are plans to update the hallways with new tiles and paint.

The installation of the sprinklers is expected to take about 14 months.

“It’s going to be a relief off of all of us,” McCarrier said.

Henry Hebert and Elizabeth Logan in front of Garden City Towers.

So what do the residents think of finally getting sprinklers?

“It’s about time,” Henry Herbert told me. “It should’ve been done a long time ago.”

Herbert is 85 and walks with a cane. He lives on the fifth floor. In the event of a fire, he’d have to make his way down five flights of stairs. But he’s lived there for five years and says, “I don’t worry about it.”

Another resident, Elizabeth Logan, said she didn’t realize there were no sprinklers until her apartment was inspected earlier this year. Logan, 63, uses a walker and said she’s also concerned about having to use the stairs in case of a fire.

How does she feel about a sprinkler system finally being installed?

“A lot safer,” she said.