Homeless lay waste to closed motel site

The Monticello Motel has been a refuge to some, a dumping ground to others, since it closed about six months ago.

By ANDREW MEACHAM

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- The nicest room at the Monticello Motel, an upstairs suite, offers two bare mattresses on the floor, some playing cards, an Emmylou Harris cassette, and a couple of paperback novels. Discarded dishes and decaying food fill the kitchen sink, but there are no discarded beer bottles and one of the mattresses is fairly clean.

The other upstairs suite is much worse. There is human waste on the floor and urine-filled quart bottles in the bedroom. Garbage billows out from under stained mattresses and collects in corners of the living room and kitchen. A bag of vermin-infested bagels as well as packets of over-the-counter medicines, mouthwash and an empty suitcase testify to weeks or months of scratching out a living in the most elemental sense.

The Monticello, 1700 Fourth St. N, also known for a time as the Monticello Retirement Home, has been closed for at least six months. A finance company bought the property from a mortgage company in late March, around the same time the power was disconnected and the water turned off for non-payment. But people have been living there all the same.

"The last four or five weeks, it's just gone crazy," said Ralph Oliva, an owner of Crescent Court, a rental property by Crescent Lake that is now being remodeled. Oliva said he had seen vagrants entering the Monticello by climbing through broken windows and ducts that used to contain air conditioning units.

"They need to board that place up," he said.

Friday morning, workers sent by Funding Management Corp. in Bradenton had arrived to do just that.

The property passed a state health inspection as recently as April. Only a handful of illegal tenants know what has caused the deterioration since. The scattered clothes and beer cans, the cigarette butts and pieces of rain-soaked bread, the overturned furniture and overflowing toilets mark the final phase in a motel that doubled as an adult living facility for a few years and ended in foreclosure.

"The building has to be demolished, it can't be used for anything," said Michael Grubbs, who owns the Value Cleaners on the motel's north side. Grubbs, like Oliva, said he considered buying the Monticello property, but his $300,000 offer was rejected by BMC Realty.

A neighbor who gave her name as Susan Shaffer -- but whom other neighbors and homeless in the area know as Grace -- said that she has fed homeless people who were sleeping in the abandoned rooms and brought them towels. She said she thinks it's only the most recent arrivals to the property who have done the most damage.

"I told them, "If you guys shut your mouth, you've got a nice place to crash here, all you homeless guys,' " Grace said. "But they ruined it."

Neighbors had spotted enough recent comings and goings to arouse their suspicions. Clifford Holensworth, a database coordinator at All Children's Hospital and president of the Crescent Lake Neighborhood Association, accompanied a pair of police officers to the Monticello last week.

"It was deplorable," Holensworth said. Police rousted the illegal tenants, who retreated to the St. Petersburg Drop-In Center, 1520 Fourth St. N. Dozens of homeless pass the daylight hours playing cards or watching television at the center, which has no beds and is run by the Suncoast Center for Community Mental Health.

Regina Franzese, 47, has been one of the regulars there and at the Monticello where, until recently at least, she had stayed in Room 4. She said she has been homeless for about a year. Midnight Thursday, she bathed fully dressed and bent over a water spigot in back of the drop-in center for at least 15 minutes.

Police had questioned Franzese Thursday afternoon at the Monticello, but did not remove her. An officer said they had determined she was visiting someone who had the owners' permission to be there. Thursday night, Franzese said she didn't know who the owners were, or whether the person she had been visiting knew the owners.

Minnie Nance bought the Monticello in 1982 for $325,000. In 1992, she obtained a state license to use up to 32 beds for an adult living facility, records of the Agency for Health Care Administration show. That license expired in September 1998. Nance died three months later at age 78.

The Monticello reverted back to a motel, now run by Charles Nance, Minnie Nance's son. Nuisance calls to the police dropped off as the assisted living population began to drift away, said Sgt. Tim Montanari.

Between January 1998 and December 1999, police answered 75 calls. But between January 2000 and July, there were only six, the most recent on July 18 from a codes investigator complaining about vagrants refusing to leave.

In the meantime, Funding Management Corp. acquired the title from Brasota Mortgage Co., which had initiated foreclosure proceedings against Minnie Nance's company. The property is now for sale through BMC Realty, a Bradenton company.

Tenants now may find it harder to enter a boarded-up Monticello without a key. For Regina Franzese and others like her, survival continues to be a struggle.

"I feel very defenseless out here, and I wonder why no one is coming to my aid," she said.

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