What will John Carlyle Crews’ death change? Nothing
By Brandon Miller

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

John Carlyle Crews leapt to his death on March 28, and then the circus came to town.

That night, a kitchen fire drove Crews to the balcony of his 18th-floor condo in the Galaxy Towers. Because of the city’s hodgepodge fire code, the 41-year-old building has no sprinklers; because of that, the blaze spread quickly. Trapped on the balcony, backlit by fire—a fire by that time busily chewing up the entire floor—Crews pleaded with the crowd below to save him. Firefighters were bogged down in what must have seemed an endless stairwell. Then Crews made the decision no one should have to make, calculating the odds of surviving the intense heat blasting from his home versus those of outliving a jump to the street below. He jumped as if spit from the mouth of an inferno, landing in a planter on Ocean Boulevard.

America is a country of happy endings. Every public crisis—every massacre on a school campus, every police beating, terrorist attack, meteorological disaster and military debacle—follows a unvarying pattern: first mourning, then outrage and the promise that things will change, and finally the certainty that things will remain just as they always were.

What will John Carlyle Crews’ death change? Nothing.

The days that followed the Galaxy Towers fire arrived with predictable declarations of sadness and resolve. TV reporters and friends gave us Crews up-close and personal—a 60-year-old jazz lover who took long walks on the beach and enjoyed cooking; in a bit of dark irony, we learned that the blaze accelerated when it hit Crews’ collection of jazz and blues tapes. Then there was this coincidence: within a day of Crews’ fatal leap, the City Council met for a long-planned hearing on fire safety. On April 3, moved by Crews’ death, the City Council met again. There, fire officials renewed their longstanding calls for safety retrofits and cash.

Long Beach Fire Marshal Hank Teran stressed the need for quick action: “We need to install fire sprinklers in our city, not eventually, I think, but now.”

The public-policy path seemed clear, and it was paved with cash and lined with sprinklers.

Some officials demanded builders install sprinkler systems in most new structures, not just high-rises and some commercial buildings. Others suggested incentives to help homeowners pay for sprinkler retrofits in older buildings. Noting that the city’s fire authority is stretched thin—between a building boom and aging housing stock, the city’s fire equipment needs a $100 million upgrade—a fire official called for a one percent “fire-impact fee” on all building sales in the city. It was a bargain, he said. A building owner rose and declared that it was indeed cheap—“unless you’re the one paying for it.”

That was the beginning of the end of the happy ending that was supposed to follow the death of John Carlyle Crews.

• • •

Long Beach was incorporated in 1888, and while that makes one of the oldest coastal cities in Southern California, the prestige comes with problems. Many of the city’s older buildings, some historic, have been grandfathered in—that is smuggled past newer iterations of the fire code. Other, newer buildings have been converted to condominiums. A loophole of uncertain but suspicious origins says condo owners can’t be forced to install fire-prevention systems.

These buildings are the femmes fatales of Long Beach—beautiful on the outside, dangerous inside. “Putting sprinklers in these buildings is so expensive,” says architect John Glasgow. “You might be signing their death warrant if you do.”

Take the International Tower, an architectural beauty, circa 1966, circular in shape, 32 stories high. Its core is concrete; each floor and wall is 18 inches of concrete. Installing a building-wide sprinkler system in the International Tower would require drilling through all that. The Tower might survive a nuclear attack, but probably not an out-of-control kitchen fire. If numbers given by property owners are right, the cost could be in the tens of millions.

Anyone who’s remodelled a kitchen can tell you that it’s impossible to predict with any real accuracy the cost of the final project. So the Long Beach Fire Department’s assurance that the cost of a sprinkler retrofit—about $2.50 per square foot—is controversial. Property owners told The District it would be more like $3 to $10 per square foot. Nor were owners mollified by the promise of better insurance rates: a report drafted by the Long Beach Fire and Planning Departments predicted a five to 20 percent drop in insurance rates for sprinkled buildings—hardly enough to win over owners.

Lest we conclude that building owners are penny pinchers unconcerned about the lives of their residents, please recall one of the key rules in government—the one about unintended consequences. At what point will the public-safety costs of sprinklering an older building drive rents beyond the reach of its residents?

“You can’t say, ‘Well we shouldn’t spend this money,’” says Nancy Ahlswede, executive director of the Apartment Owners Association of California, Southern Cities. “A human life is invaluable. At the same time, you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, either. Sprinklers won’t do any good if housing costs go through the roof and no one can afford to live in the buildings.”

• • •

There are times when we all say things we can’t put back in our mouths, and Val Lerch may wish he hadn’t said, just days after Crews’ death, that Long Beach was “ready to explode.”

Lerch is the city’s Ninth District council representative and heads the Public Health & Safety commission, the governing body charged with making sure we don’t burn the city down. During the day, he works for property management firm Pabst-Kinney. While on an April bus tour with developers, title sellers, and lenders—a bus tour he organized and led—Lerch said his district is a “new frontier” for developers.

That new frontier, like all frontiers, is a border; this one marks the place where old meets new, where you can discern the forces behind the death of John Carlyle Crews—the city’s booming real estate development, the desire of many residents to preserve Long Beach’s historic buildings, and a fire authority run ragged. Suzanne Fricke, the city’s director of planning, says Long Beach will grow in 20 years by 56,000 people and 6,300 residential units, many of them in the already dense downtown. Meanwhile, elected officials, the fire authority, and building owners and managers seem to have talked themselves into gridlock.

And it’s not just Long Beach. This is America. Crews’ death is part of a predictable phenomenology of crisis, one San Diego Fire Marshal Clifford Hunter saw in his hometown. A few years ago, Hunter told the Los Angeles Times his aging coastal city was hit by repeated fire disasters. Following each one, he said, he has a brief window to appeal for support. “But then,” he said, “people suddenly and quickly forget what happened, and it starts to become a dollar issue.”

Hunter told the Times the usual cycle—from outrage to nonchalance—is about six months. Long Beach got there in six weeks.