Christmas Wrap

In the spirit of the season on Christmas Eve, Gossips offers three gifts--like the Gifts of the Magi. (I know that's Epiphany, but I don't want to wait thirteen days to share any of this.) Two of the gifts are good news. The third is a gift pure and simple. Here's the first. 

On a tip from a reader, I headed down to the Robert Taylor House this morning to check out a report that the house had been wrapped up for Christmas--not decorative wrap but protective wrap. I discovered that the front and back doors and a broken window had been boarded up and the holes in the roof had been covered.  

I don't know how this came to pass. At the November meeting of the Historic Preservation Commission, City Attorney Cheryl Roberts suggested, in response to my insistence that action needed to be taken to arrest the deterioration to this historic building, that the City could initiate a civil action against the owners under Article 169 of the City Code (the historic preservation law). I don't know if this was done or not, but it doesn't matter. The building now has a better chance of surviving the winter. I just hope the cats reported to be sheltering there were not inside when they boarded it up.