Post by Origanalist on Oct 11, 2016 19:26:27 GMT -8
It was going to be Ed Johnson’s Halloween masterpiece. Ten rooms of haunted house screams: a meat market, an apocalypse room, zombie babies, evil clowns.
And if Jefferson Avenue’s Mr. Halloween — the guy who wears skull bracelets and skull-emblazoned black T-shirts year-round — says it was to be the best ever, hundreds of his neighbors were waiting in ghoulish anticipation.
“We’ve done this every year, and every year we made it a little better, a little bigger,” Johnson said of what was going to be his haunted house’s fifth year of fear in his yard in the city’s West End.
And, then, a little red slip of paper was stuck to his mailbox a week ago. A Stop Work Order from the City of St. Paul.
It turns out, a passing city inspector saw the framing for the haunted house. Johnson guesses it’s because the 2-by-4 framing looks an awful lot like he’s extending his house. Officials told him he needs a special events permit and must submit engineered plans to obtain one.
On Wednesday, despite efforts over the past week to appease city inspectors, this lover of all things Halloween gave his Facebook fans the bad news: There will be no haunted house this year.
Before St. Paul gave him a Stop Work Order, Ed Johnson had plans to host his fifth haunted house on Jefferson Avenue.
Before St. Paul gave him a Stop Work Order, Ed Johnson had plans to host his fifth haunted house on Jefferson Avenue.
“They were deeming it permanent … but it’s temporary,” Johnson said of the haunted house that was to be up for three days at the end of October. “I don’t know why the city can’t understand it’s a temporary deal.”
Thursday morning, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections indicated that all may not be lost for Johnson and his neighbors. Robert Humphrey said the city’s priority is to ensure that the haunted house is safe and that there are sufficient exits for people going through it.
“I think we’re willing to work with him, as we would with anyone,” Humphrey said, adding that, as of yet, “He hasn’t presented any plans that show this is a safe structure for the public.”
Another haunted house, the Butcher Shop House of Gore, was also shut down by city inspectors, the haunted house’s owners posted on their website and Facebook page. This time, it was because the haunted house was an unlicensed for-profit business operating in a residential area, Humphrey said. There, the haunted house was to operate for 17 days. This was to be its sixth year.
Neighborhood haunt
Johnson, who has lived in his Jefferson Avenue house since 1999 and whose family has been in the West Seventh area of St. Paul for a century, called his haunted house “a labor of love.”
He was planning to ask for donations of $2 and use his haunted house as a fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation. His daughter was diagnosed with the disease 11 years ago. Hundreds of neighbors have passed through his macabre sets each Halloween. And they love it.
“The whole community is involved,” he said. “This is heartbreaking.”
Dozens of posts — many of them angry at the city for its anti-Halloween action — on the neighborhood Facebook page attest to that.
continued.. www.startribune.com/city-may-axe-st-paul-neighborhood-haunted-house/396171231/#7