Historic Mat Maid warehouse burns

PALMER — An Anchorage attorney who owns the Matanuska Maid warehouse that burned down early Tuesday morning said it wasn’t insured and isn’t really sure what he’ll do now.

While losing the building was a big hit for him financually, that’s not what Bill Ingaldson said saddens him most.

“Probably more so, way more so in my opinion, is that this great building is lost,” Ingaldson said.

Mat-Su Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan said a person from Valley Hotel saw the blaze and reported in at 3:33 a.m.

No injuries were reported, but the historic building is a total loss, he said.

Palmer Fire Chief John McNutt was first on the scene, Palmer Public Safety Director Jon Owen said. McNutt reported flames lapping at the roof from the eaves of the historic warehouse.

A couple of minutes later, McNutt reported that the roof was fully engulfed. Once the flames were through the roof, Owen said, McNutt realized it would be a defensive fire. There was no saving the warehouse, but there was plenty at risk if it spread, namely to the Crowley fuel distribution yard next door.

“We could have had a conflagration,” Owen said. “The firefighters went to what I consider tremendous lengths to prevent Crowley from being ignited.”

Owen said a ladder truck from Palmer and two more from Central Mat-Su Fire Department surrounded the fire and knocked it down from above.

“We basically fought this fire from above,” he said.

At its peak, he estimated 5,000 gallons of water were thrown on the fire per minute.

The fire marshal and Palmer police will conduct a joint investigation into the fire’s cause, but that will take some time, Owen said. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact Palmer police Sgt. Shayne La Croix at 745-4811.

Brodigan said it would likely be several weeks before a cause is determined.

“It’s a difficult task sifting through all the debris,” he said.

Owen said that the building was more-or-less abandoned.

“Anytime there’s a fire in an abandoned building and there’s no obvious source of ignition such as, say a hot water heater that got too close to some clothes or an obvious wiring problem, the first thing you have to look for is the possibility of illegal activity because one of the tasks of any fire department is to determine the cause and origin of a fire,” Owen said.

Ingaldson said there was no electricity or heat in the building. He said he’s pretty sure it was arson, adding that at this time, there doesn’t seem to be a more logical explanation. And while he seemed pretty sure it was arson, why anyone would set such a fire is puzzling.

“To just burn it down is just really hard for me to even understand at all,” Ingaldson said. “We all went through our times when maybe we did stupid things, but to just burn down someone else’s property?”

But that is more-or-less what happened to one of the building’s neighbors, the Mat-Maid co-op building that burned down in 2003. Three Palmer juveniles were arrested in that case, according to Frontiersman archives.

In Tuesday’s fire, a storage shed attached to the building next door also was consumed in the blaze, according to Chris and Robert Mollica, who rent the building and had planned to open a new business there.

Robert Mollica said he discovered the loss when he went out for coffee at 5:30 a.m. and saw smoke coming from downtown.

“I thought it was this place,” he said.

The couple said their business plans are in limbo now.

Chris Mollica said firefighters had to break into the building to fight the fire inside after the flames began to lick at that structure, too.

“It’s going to be a mess for quite a while,” she said.

The city of Palmer, working with a $3.3 million budget of voter-approved bonds, is in the process of buying up all the land on that block.

Palmer city spokeswoman Janette Bower said the city is in the process of negotiating to buy several Mat Maid properties, but haven’t closed on any of the properties yet.

Tuesday morning she said it was probably too early to tell how the fire might change the city’s negotiations over the properties.

The borough’s 2012 tax rolls value the warehouse at $79,400 and the land at $300,500.

Ingaldson said he bought the warehouse and the iconic Palmer watertower in a foreclosure sale. He said he’d had plans to develop it. He’d even brought water and sewer lines to the property.

But the lot featured pretty prominently in the city’s plans, and he didn’t want to do anything with the property that would conflict with what the city had in mind.

For instance, if the city wanted to make the area a tourist destination and convention center, he didn’t want to make the building into apartments.

So he waited for the city to make up its mind and was, lately at least, talking with city officials about a potential sale. In the meantime, he said, he did what he could to keep people out. He’d board it back up when kids broke in. He even switched to Torx screws to make it harder for vandals to take his boards down.

He said the warehouse was beautifully built. There were high ceilings in the basement that would have made for great apartments. Upstairs would have made good two-level condos or mixed-use space for artists to have studios downstairs and living quarters in an upper loft.

It was built with Douglas fir timbers and tongue-and-groove wood floors. There wasn’t a knot in any of it.

“You just can’t find wood like that anymore anywhere,” Ingaldson said. “If you had any imagination at all it had really a lot of potential.”

And, he said, he spent a lot of time and money coming up with plans for what to do with it. Now his best hope is that maybe some of the timbers or some other pieces of the building are salvageable.

“Maybe we can figure out something positive to do with what is remaining,” Ingaldson said.

The warehouse has been listed since at least 2009 on the Alaska Association for Historic Preservation’s annual list of the state’s “Ten Most Endangered Historic Properties.”

Contact managing editor Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268. Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.