City releases confidential report on Preston Springs Hotel demolition

The City of Cambridge released a confidential report Friday on the former Preston Springs Hotel that weighed the options of the cost of keeping it standing to tearing it down.

The heritage building at 102 Fountain St. S. met it's fate the last week of December 2020 after Chief Building Officer Dennis Purcell issued an emergency order to demolish the historic hotel. 

While the order may have seemed last minute, city records show Purcell had presented a report to the city in January of 2020 in a closed-door meeting where he outlined how unsafe the building was and his recommendation to the owner of the property to demolish it.

Pointing to engineering reports which "identify that deterioration is occurring at an accelerated rate" Purcell and the City of Cambridge also took into consideration what it would take to keep the building standing.

The report released Friday outlined a list of expensive repairs needed to keep the structure standing. They include: 

• Between $500,000 and $750,000 to stabilize the west wall and limit access to the west addition.
• $1.5 to $2 million to make the building "weather-tight" to prevent the building from deteriorating.
• $25,000 annually for security monitoring. 

But an engineers report determined even those measures would "achieve uncertain results." 

"Given the significant challenges technically, financially and security wise of restoring the building to a minimum standard of safety identified, and evidence of uncertain results, the chief building official has determined that demolition is the appropriate action," the report said.

The report also included four pages of complaints from the public to the city, dating back to 1995, about the Preston Springs Hotel property. 

The list of problems range from doors and windows not being secure to fires, broken windows, graffiti and complaints of overgrown grass and weeds.