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Building under construction in Maverick Square partially collapses; residents in neighboring building evacuated

Partially collapsed building.

Not looking good. Photo by Jameson Brown.

A four-story residential building at 4 Winthrop St. is going to need some major repairs before it even is ready for occupancy, Greater Boston Radio reports.

The Boston Fire Department reports 28 residents in a Maverick Street building adjacent to the construction site were ordered out as a precaution.

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Comments

So mad....I tried to go to the Cactus for lunch...no such luck... but I do hope no one was hurt by falling debris.

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Shoulda gone to Rosticeria Cancun.

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I looked at the picture and it looked like it may have had a fire at some point - either that or black rot on the structural timbers.

I'd be amazed if they don't have to tear it all down and start over.

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With just a gentle tap! The building must have REALLY compromised to come down so easily.

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Another developer lets a nice brownstone in the area go to ruins, likely to replaced by the same generic garbage they've been throwing up all over the neighborhood.

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MG2 Group, a Quincy-based development company, bought 4, 6 and 8 Winthrop Street in 2016 as part of its move into East Boston:

MG2 thrives on identifying and investing in up and coming urban areas. Over the past few years East Boston has been a location of expansive growth and investment. MG2 has made several acquisitions ranging from existing three-family buildings to larger parcels such as 60 Border Street along the waterfront.

It paid $715,000 for 4 Winthrop.

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"130 Total years of industry experience"

You'd think with that many years of experience, they'd have learned how to not have a building just fall down.

Though can we talk about how dumb that adding-up-all-the-experience-in-the-company thing is? It's kind of like bragging that your 50 employee company has 100 arms and 500 toes.

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Even my parents ended up finding all sorts of irregular stuff in their west coast home - like the fact that their house was 20 years older than they thought and did not match the foundation because it was moved uphill to make room for a 4-plex after a much older building had burned down. This was not known at the time because the deed records for the entire city only went back to 1905 when the registry burned down.

Don't get me started on the structural alterations made to run modern plumbing in subsequent renovations.

When I gut renovated my kitchen, I found four studs that didn't go all the way to the floor. For reasons unknown, they had been cut and never repaired. My carpenter fixed this, and suddenly the dormer above it didn't shake when someone went upstairs. I had no idea.

tl/dr: many old structures have been messed with by people who didn't know what they were doing and who covered up what evidence there was of their alterations. Things rot in hidden locations.

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"Ever buy or live in an old house?"

You could say that. I have a 100+ year old home that it appears someone may have removed what is possibly load-bearing wall in the basement. So I guess the irony being that I also have an East Boston home that may just collapse one day as well.

I think the major difference is I don't claim to be an expert. It just seems like that would have been something they would have fixed ASAP when they acquired the property, though. There was a similar case on Maverick Street a couple years ago in which shoddy work caused a wall to collapse, quite similar to this. Maybe I'm assuming a bit much.

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Finding deficiencies that have been covered over isn't as simple as you might think. Look at old This Old House videos - those guys are professionals, and they are often surprised by what they find once they start taking walls down.

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Except in this case it was very obvious to just a passerby in the street that the top floors on these buildings were slap-dashed on years ago. God only knows what that did to the structural integrity of the building. With the exception of the earliest homes in Eastie, a lot of the late 19th/early 20th century residential construction is known to have been tenement housing, popped up on land fill for the purposes of crowding more and more immigrants into them. Not exactly a formula for excessive investment in quality (although there are some nice ones).

Anyone who comes into the n'hood as a speculating developer knows this. Getting a home inspector to go over a building is a necessary thing for Joan and John Q. Homebuyer, so I would think that these companies with their millenia of experience and multiple limbs would be capable of really investigating these buildings and identifying structural problems. Of course given the rapidly ballooning property values, who gives a crap. Let it collapse, the land is still worth the money -- especially once you get one of them ugly-ass cubes on there with 40 luxury microunits in front of the T station "in Boston's hottest neighborhood!"

But yeah, old buildings frequently have lots of surprises - no argument there.

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