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Nearly up in smoke
Downtown fire recalled 5 years later
Pizza, pasta, beer, wine.
Coffee, books, antiques, clothes.
Farmers markets, First Fridays, music, community.
Life in downtown Greencastle has been positively stellar for the last few years, and getting better all the time.
Much of the credit, and rightly so, goes to the 2011 Stellar Communities grant and the Greencastle-DePauw University partnership that made it happen.
What’s now often forgotten in the conversation is how it almost — quite literally — went down in flames on one sunny May morning.
It was five years ago Thursday — May 17, 2013 — that more than half a block of East Washington Street was gutted by fire, with the rest of the buildings threatened by the blaze for much of the morning.
“Five years, I can’t believe it, but so much has happened in those five years.”
These words, spoken by Sue Murray Thursday afternoon, echo those of many in the community surprised that it’s been half a decade. But they hold a bit of extra weight coming from the woman who was serving her second term as mayor in 2013.
The dispatch came in at 7:21 a.m. and Murray was notifed soon thereafter.
“I got a call right away and I started walking immediately,” Murray recalls.
The fire started on the eastern half of the block and began working its way outward, quickly overtaking Wilson’s Photography, Wilson Formal Wear and Buzz Bomb Graphics, all owned by Lester and Judy Wilson, as well as working its way west to the Pawn Store, Dr. Perry Wainman DDS and Greencastle Furniture.
For a while, the fire seemingly couldn’t be quenched.
“The black smoke would come and then they would be able to suppress it,” Murray recalls. “And all of a sudden there would be a huge flame somewhere else. We kept watching it move farther and farther down Washington Street.”
Although the Stellar grant had been announced more than two years before, upgrades to that many buildings and roads takes time, meaning the projects were just beginning to pay off.
“It was just the September before that the bookstore and Starbucks were completed as the first facades,” Murray recalls.
And for much of the morning what was right in the seemingly inevitable path of the fire but Eli’s Books and Starbucks, and along with them, DePauw’s plan to connect the town and university by bringing the university bookstore and a coffee shop downtown.
“I think we were all just somehow hoping and praying that at least those two buildings could be saved because if we had lost that first anchor, we would not be able to rebuild,” Murray said. “We had already seen what had happened in North Vernon.”
North Vernon had been the other city named a Stellar Community in the inaugural year of the program. Unfortunately, North Vernon’s Stellar projects had already been marred by a series of fires.
At some point in the morning, things did turn. The fire’s progress was halted mid-block in the building owned by Greg and Trudy Selvia (which housed the now-defunct Greencastle Furniture).
The former mayor credits this to the ability of so many emergency workers — 97 from 18 different agencies — to come together for a common cause.
Besides pulling in pretty much every fire department in Putnam County, the blaze also pulled in crews from Crawfordsville, Brazil, Danville and Plainfield, and with them additional aerial trucks to fight the flames from the top down.
“We had more than just our tower truck there,” Murray said. “The ability of all of those departments to work together was probably what saved those buildings.”
Even with the flames out, questions remained.
“We all thought it could end right there,” Murray said of the positive momentum in downtown.
Sure, the walls were still standing, but were they stable? And what happened to the remaining buildings if any of them had to come down?
“I don’t know how the community would have responded and I don’t know how the owners could have responded,” Murray said.
Onto the scene came Arsee Engineers, who brought with them some hope — the buildings could be saved but it was going to take some work and some investment.
“The leader of that pack was Perry Wainman,” Murray said. “His determination to come back bolstered everybody.”
For many outside observers, Dr. Perry Wainman’s dental practice was a wild card after the fire. Into his late 60s and with 40 years of practice under his belt, who could have blamed him for simply getting out?
To talk to Wainman today, it’s hard to imagine that thought even crossed his mind.
“It was a little bit of money, but if I had to do it all over again, I would,” Wainman said.
Wainman and his crew quickly got to work getting records out of the building. They took up temporary residence down the street, operating out of part of optometrist Russell Elliott’s building for more than a year.
In July 2014, they returned to their old location, back and better than ever. Once he knew things were stable, Wainman then started looking toward the next chapter of life.
“We got back in, we got things back running again,” Wainman said. “We found an individual who was interested in buying the practice — Dr. Kirsch. She wasn’t in there five minutes and she fell in love with us.”
Even after the sale, Wainman stayed on until December 2017 before officially retiring.
“In all honestly, Dr. Kirsch coming in has really been a blessing. I wasn’t looking at corporate-type management and she wanted to be herself. I was able to walk away happy.”
Down the block, the Wilsons haven’t walked away and while the last five years have been a grind at times, Lester and Judy still know to count their blessings.
“We got married 45 years ago and sometimes something like this can wreck a marriage,” Lester Wilson said, “and I think it’s made us stronger.”
Of course, it hasn’t all been easy. There have been struggles with insurance, lawsuits and health, to say nothing of the business itself. But the Wilsons don’t take time to be bitter.
“It’s just what life threw at us that day,” Lester said. “Our positive are that we are in business, we are surviving.”
Still, the fire was a double whammy for the Wilsons, who lost their business and their home in the blaze, as they shared the upstairs living quarters with their adult children and grandchildren.
The veteran business owner does recall, with a bit of irony, that they were just about to get out of the tuxedo business in 2013, something he says is really happening in 2018.
Prom season was just over — thankfully, so that it didn’t leave 70 or 80 kids without clothes for the big night — and the Wilsons were just about ready to call it a day with the tuxes.
“That summer of 2013, we were going to see how weddings went and maybe stop doing tuxedos,” he recalls. “But a shop down the street closed and we had a temporary shop at the old Coke plant and we did tuxedo rentals out of there. And we did well.”
That buoyed them early on, with so much of their equipment either damaged or in storage.
The discontinuation of the tuxedo portion of the business underscores the refocusing the Wilsons have done in recent years. The printing equipment came out of storage not functioning properly, thus putting the brakes on that portion of the business as well.
And so it’s back to photography, what they started with back in November 1976.
“We’ve got to focus on weddings, doing framing and photo restoration,” Lester said. “We’re going to be more strictly photography related.”
To that end, they’ve shot some destination weddings as well as expanding their base of restoration clients. They recently completed a project for a client in Carmel as well as having done about 20 for a woman in Columbus, Ohio, whom they’ve never even met.
“We look forward to getting back to what we started with,” Lester said.
The remodel of the building has only been partial, as the Wilsons know the day will come when they’ll sell the structure.
“The main level was all redone, all new electrical,” Lester said. “As far as our second floor, it’s all been gutted and ready for someone to build it.”
Even looking back to the day of the fire, Lester finds the positives — no one was hurt and their grandkids were already on their way to school when the fire started.
“From that perspective, we felt blessed that God was looking out for us,” he said.
He’s not the only one with those sort of sentiments after that spring day. Murray warmly recalled the Masonic Temple — just steps from Wilson’s — being opened to feed emergency workers and get them out of the weather, as well as kind acts of others.
“Once again, this community constantly amazes me,” Murray said. “It was just a community coming together and watching that happen together and saying immediately, ‘How can we move forward?’
“I think the other thing it underscored for me that day was how responsive our community outside Putnam County is in a time of emergency,” she added.
It’s just that the kind of community that Wainman refused to leave in the lurch.
“I was here 45 years and people treated me well, so I couldn’t walk away and leave a hole in the downtown,” he said.