Logan Triangle holdouts say they're hardly sunk

FOR LOGAN residents Jose Duprey and Meralys Aviles, it's country-living in the middle of the city.

They found a possum on their basement stairs one morning. On another, a squirrel climbed in through a kitchen window and noshed on some bread. The couple's three daughters chase rabbits in their back yard - acres of it.

The family lives in one of the eight remaining houses in the "Logan Triangle" - a five-sided, 35-acre piece of land bordered by Roosevelt Boulevard and Wingohocking, Loudon, 11th and 7th streets.

Almost all of Duprey and Aviles' neighbors - more than 950 of them - are gone. They sold their homes, which have since been torn down, because they were sinking into a forgotten creekbed. For blocks and blocks the triangle is now a near-empty urban prairie, save for weeds and trash.

"There's nobody around here with a house like this," said Duprey, who rents the neat three-bedroom home for $600 a month.

Actually, there's really nobody around at all, except a church a few blocks away and another lonely house standing in the middle of the acreage.

And although the couple's home is visible from Roosevelt Boulevard, it seems isolated, somehow forgotten.

Last year, the couple said, a "government lady" came and put an offer in on the house. Their landlord is considering it, they said. As renters, they would be given relocation assistance.

"But I'm not trying to go anywhere," Duprey said. "There's nothing wrong with this house. Not a crack. Nothing."

Land in limbo

The "Logan Sinking Homes" debacle began in 1986, when a gas explosion alerted city officials to something that residents had long known: Their homes were settling, cracking walls, foundations and gas lines as they sank.

They'd been built in the 1920s atop Wingohocking Creek, which was diverted into a pipe, its creekbed filled with cinder, ash and other materials not suited for building foundations.

It took almost 15 years to relocate the homeowners and to tear down most of the structures. The area has sat vacant ever since. In recent years, those whose homes border the triangle have complained about the slow progress that's been made either cleaning up or redeveloping the parcel.

A spokesman for the city's Redevelopment Authority confirmed that officials are trying to buy out the remaining homeowners, but plans for the future are far from certain.