Up in Smoke

Every year, the Minneapolis Fire Department responds to more than 30,000 calls for service, but only about one in fifteen of those calls involves a fire. Emergency medical service and rescue—911 requests on behalf of persons having heart attacks or requiring extrication from an auto wreck—make up two-thirds of the calls to the MFD and false alarms one-sixth, according to the department. Of the fire calls, only about half—annually about 1,000—are for structural fires (as opposed to vehicular and “other” blazes) and only a few of those attract any attention beyond the immediate neighborhood. If no one is seriously hurt or killed—in 2005 there were five civilian fatalities in Minneapolis and none involving firefighters—a structural fire is no more likely to make headlines than a car theft.

One that did probably began sometime during the early evening of November 30, 2005, one year ago. A fire department report says the initial call was received at 8:48 p.m., and exactly six minutes later the first fire truck—a pumper from Station 22, on the west end of Lake Street—arrived in front of 2528 West Lake of the Isles Parkway. The average MFD response time is less than four minutes, but the streets were icy that evening, making the neighborhood’s narrow, serpentine byways particularly difficult for the  big fire rigs to negotiate. Park and city police squads were already at the site, and neighbors, roused by the sirens and urgent phone calls from other neighbors, were bundling up and spilling out onto the street, observing but not quite believing the spectacle erupting in front of them.

Bonnie Sipkins, watching from across Sheridan Avenue, saw garish red flashes in the windows on the side of the stricken house. At first, she thought they were reflections of the lights on the squad cars in the street and alley; then she realized they were flames licking at the house’s interior. The chilling words of a neighbor whose call moments earlier had sent Sipkins into the frigid night echoed in her head: “Bonnie! The Balcos house is on fire!”  

The Balcos house may not have been the largest or grandest home on Lake of the Isles, where many of the city’s largest and grandest homes have been assembled like so many hotels on Boardwalk, nor were its owners as well known as some of the other current or recent homeowners in the neighborhood—the William Pohlads, Paul Magers, Josh Hartnett, Bobby McFerrin. But the house was a landmark, a familiar and imposing Italianate structure regally positioned on an elevated double lot overlooking a wide swath of parkland and Lake of the Isles’ western shore. Comprising more than 6,600 square feet and eighteen  rooms, it was a home fit for a corporate chief executive, movie star, or foreign ambassador—and sometimes was mistaken for such. And while the owners—Emmanuel and Ophelia Balcos—were none of those things, they were quietly prominent, respected, and cherished in both the Isles neighborhood and the community at large.

Manny and Ophelia Balcos had lived in the big house for thirty-two years—they had raised all five of their now-grown children there—but they were not on the premises the night it burned. The house was furnished, but had been unoccupied for several months because the Balcoses, following Ophelia’s knee replacement, had moved to a town house in St. Louis Park. The Lake of the Isles home had been for sale since the previous June. The Balcoses were asking $2.5 million, and just that afternoon Manny and a real estate broker had taken a potential buyer through the premises. Manny had turned off the lights and secured the front door for the last time about 5:30 that evening.

The initial firefighters on the scene were investigating a report of smoke in the area—smoke was visible above the trees from the northernmost tip of the lake, half a mile away—and almost immediately upon arrival determined that the smoke was coming from the big house on the corner and not from an overheated car engine or a backyard cookout. Having forced open the locked front door, the entry crew moved into the house and began searching the four levels (first and second floors, attic, and basement) for both signs of life and the source of the fire. The smoke was already so dense inside that the firefighters had to feel their way along the walls and employ thermal-imaging cameras. The large rooms filled with furniture made navigation especially difficult. “You get entangled in things,” said a firefighter later. “It’s very hot, and you can’t see a thing.” 

Bonnie Sipkins didn’t have the Balcoses’ new phone number, so she called their oldest son, Edwin, who lives in south Minneapolis. Edwin’s wife, Kim, said they knew about the fire. Eileen Balcos Bauman, the couple’s oldest daughter, who lives next door to her parents in St. Louis Park, was the first family member to hear the news when a high school friend, whose wife happened to drive past the house, called her a few minutes after 9 p.m. Eileen first called Edwin’s house, but the line was busy, then called the home of her sister, Eydie Waletzki, who was at work, and talked to Eydie’s husband, Darrin. Then Eileen called her father next door. Manny Balcos’s first word on hearing the news was “Why?” “I’m not sure why I said ‘Why?’ ” he mused later. “ ‘Why us?’ is probably what I meant. The house had been inspected and was in good shape. Why should it be on fire?”

“Eileen called again,” Edwin would recall. “I heard my wife saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’ I just wanted to know that no one had been in the house. Once I knew that everyone was OK, then it was better.” The Balcoses drove to the house from their separate homes around the city. “I wasn’t expecting the big deal it was,” Edwin said. “But I could see the fire trucks from across the lake. I didn’t see flames, but there was a lot of smoke.”

Eileen drove her father to the site, and family members stood among the growing number of neighbors, friends, and onlookers in the subfreezing cold watching the big house—belching clouds of dark smoke and now assaulted on all sides by firefighters—burn from the inside out. Manny, in his haste, had not dressed for the weather. Neighbors brought him a heavy jacket, cap, and gloves, but he may not have noticed. Tears streamed down his face. He would later recall his last visit to the house only hours earlier: “I remember telling myself, ‘The house looks so good, the house looks so good.’ I wanted to go back and take it off the market. Everything was so good. Even the yard was good.”

“It was surreal,” says his friend and longtime neighbor Bonnie Sipkins. “Manny was stunned. Shocked. We all were.”

Fire chief Bonnie Bleskachek arrived at the Balcos house at about 9:35 p.m., three-quarters of an hour after the first call and about the time firefighters on the scene called in a second alarm. Driving to the site from Parade Stadium, where she’d been watching her daughter play hockey, Bleskachek could envision the house. She didn’t live in the neighborhood, but as an avid runner she had passed it many times while circling the lake. “I could picture it because it stood out,” she said later. “It was such a beautiful house.”

Once there, Bleskachek learned that the fire, which apparently started near the rear of the house, was now in the walls and the “cockloft” (attic). “Every wall we open we have fire,” she was told. “It’s burning all around us.” Like many homes built during the first part of the twentieth century, the Balcos house was an example of balloon-frame construction—floors are hung on studs that rise uninterrupted from basement to attic, forming a virtual chimney for fire to spread between the interior and exterior surfaces of the walls. What’s more, the firefighters had quickly realized the house was no ordinary home. Dimensions aside, it had been built to last, to be the ambassadorial castle it resembled. The walls that now contained the fire were among the strongest that even the veterans among the crews on-site could remember. Behind thick plaster lay wire lathe, which resisted attempts to punch holes in the walls and get at the flames. “We looked at each other and agreed it was time to get our people out,” Bleskachek would recall of a conversation with her staff. “We’re not going to save this one.” The firefighters were concerned the fire would spread to the house immediately to the north. They could be thankful that they had to worry about “exposure” on only one side because the house occupied a corner lot. But that and the fact there were no “civilians” to rescue from the burning structure was about all the firefighters had going for them that night.

With all hands outside, the crews could direct their hoses and water cannon on the burning house. Even now, though, the house’s stout construction slowed and complicated the work. Its dozens of tall windows, through which the firefighters wanted to blast the water, seemed as impenetrable as the walls. “Usually, we bounce our ladders off the windows and they break easily,” Mike Carswell, an MFD battalion chief on the scene that night, explained later. “But these windows didn’t break the way windows normally break. Windows will also break from the force of the water, but they were resistant to that too.”

To make matters worse, ice from the tens of thousands of gallons of water the firefighters were pouring on the house was forming everywhere, outmatching the crews’ attempts to throw down the buckets of sand they carry for such occasions (and causing the night’s lone casualty when a firefighter wrenched his back). There was also the potential, given the enormous demand and the limits of the hydrants in the neighborhood, of running short of water—a fine irony inasmuch as a 120-acre lake lay directly across the street.

For many of those standing behind police lines on the south side of Sheridan and east of the parkway, or later watching the 10 p.m. news, thoughts were less about the firefighters’ woes than history and aesthetics. Persons familiar with the West Isles neighborhood knew the area was losing an important piece of its past. Though not of official significance (the neighborhood had never been designated a Historic District, nor was the house itself on the Historic Register), the Balcos home dated back to 1922. It was built during the height of the upscale development that extended the residential precincts of the city’s business and professional elite southwesterly from Lowry Hill along the north and west sides of Lake of the Isles. It had been designed by Ernest Kennedy, who studied at the University of Minnesota and the Sorbonne and, during the first several decades of the 1900s, designed homes for the Pillsburys, Walkers, Crosbys, and other notable local families. The house’s first occupant was Axel Lillehei, a Norwegian–born dentist and an uncle of C. Walton Lillehei, the legendary U of M heart surgeon.

The big stucco house, often described as neoclassical revival or derivative, was immediately distinctive, even among the sprawling, often ostentatious manses that ringed the lake. Its crescent shape and views of the parkland and lake made it stand out. Guests entered—as did the firefighters on the house’s last night—via a seventeen-by-ten-foot foyer. To the left was a large main-floor living room with an alcoved fireplace and windows overlooking both the lake in front and the gardens out back; to the right, also looking out on the lake, was a dining room capacious enough for a banquet-sized table, china cabinet, and sideboards. A large kitchen behind the dining room included a breakfast nook and butler’s pantry. A main-floor family room featured inlaid marble floors and its own fireplace, not to mention additional lake vistas and access to a spacious sun porch beyond. Upstairs lay four large bedrooms, a library (with yet another fireplace), an office, and three full baths; a fifth bedroom and half-bath were located on the third level beneath the roof. The basement included a twenty-four-by-thirty-two-foot amusement room built with rustic log walls and said to replicate a lodge favored by Teddy Roosevelt.

Sipkins, who with her husband, Peter, moved into their home across the street in 1973, remembered looking up at the enormous salmon-colored house—“kind of like this villa”—with a wonder that didn’t fade over the years.  

The Balcoses had moved into the house four months before the Sipkinses moved into theirs—on April 4, 1973, Ophelia’s birthday. Manny was a noted Twin Cities colon-rectal surgeon and clinical professor at the University of Minnesota. Ophelia, who had trained as a nurse, was a leader in civic, charitable, school, and church activities (among other roles, she chaired the city’s human rights commission). Born and raised in the Philippines, they had come to the Twin Cities in 1963 to complete their medical education. They purchased their first Isles-area home—at 2211 West Isles Parkway—in 1968. Manny, a serious runner, loved all the city lakes, but “Isles,” he said, “was always special.” The couple’s love affair with 2528 West Isles Parkway was unabashed and unabated over the years and was shared by their children and grandchildren. Accomplished cooks, Manny and Ophelia entertained there often, their guests including the mayor, members of the city’s civil rights commission, acquaintances from the Basilica of Saint Mary, U of M faculty, and other prominent friends and colleagues. Manny enjoyed reading the morning paper in the sunroom, while Ophelia was partial to the pink so-called “powder room” that doubled as a first-floor guest room. Their five kids—ages twelve to three when the family moved into the house—happily attended the public schools in the neighborhood, played soccer, softball,  and baseball at Kenwood Park, and entertained their own friends in the well-equipped downstairs rec room that looked like something out of the Old West. 

When the Balcoses decided to sell the house, they were responding to the realities of their age and stage in life, not to a loss of enthusiasm for the place. The house’s six stairways had become daunting, especially for Ophelia with her bad knees. Moreover, with the kids married and in homes of their own, there was simply much more space than the couple needed or wanted to keep up. (By their own admission, the Balcoses are the kind of people who clean the house before the cleaners arrive. “Their home was always meticulously, almost fanatically, maintained,” says one acquaintance.) Not least, there was an annual property-tax bill of already more than $25,000. Even so, the decision to put the house on the market was hard, for everybody. The house was where they had lived for so long and where they gathered for every holiday, birthday, and important event (and on many not-so-important occasions as well), even after the kids had gone their separate ways. The original asking price was $2.7 million. But, according to people who knew the property, the house needed serious updating. A new owner, for instance, would probably want to push out the back wall and extend and modernize the kitchen, but, because the house was positioned so far back on the lot, there was little space to expand in that direction. The Balcoses eventually dropped the price to $2.5 million.     

For the family, on the night of November 30, the thoughts were both nostalgic and in the moment. The Balcos children simply couldn’t believe they were watching their house burn down. Though they had reluctantly come to grips with their parents’ decision to sell, the structure on fire in front of them was still home—“the house.” Only six days earlier, they had gathered—three generations of Balcoses and in-laws—for the lavish Thanksgiving dinner their parents had been serving every year for as long as the kids could remember. In less than a month, they had planned to meet again to exchange gifts around a big traditional Christmas tree in the living room. They believed that year’s holidays would be the last ones they’d celebrate in the house because next year another family would be gathering in the sunny rooms with the spectacular views of the lake.

“It was strange,” Eileen Bauman said months later. “The fire seemed like it was smoldering, with no visible flames, and then it would shoot up and seem to move around. And it was so cold. Still, the whole sidewalk on the other side of Sheridan was lined with people, just standing there, watching.”

Because of the cold—thermometers would dip into the low teens, with a wind chill near zero—and because there was nothing they could do as the firefighters fought the stubborn blaze deep into the night and because Ophelia was waiting anxiously at the couple’s town home, Manny and three of his children departed before midnight. Daughter Eydie Waletzki came from work at about 12:45 a.m. and stayed an hour and a half or so, “just watching.” Later she said, “There was still smoke coming out of every window. When I asked one of the firefighters when we’d be able to go in and get things, he looked at me and said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘My family.’ And he said, ‘Never. It’s going to collapse on itself.’ That was about two o’clock.” The roof fell into the house within an hour.

For one of the Balcos children, the experience was particularly bizarre. Ethan Balcos, who teaches dance at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, was alerted to the fire by a phone call from Edwin’s wife. Oddly, Ethan was then the first of the siblings to reach their youngest brother, Eric, who lived in the Twin Cities, but had not been answering his cell phone. “It was so weird,” said Ethan. “I told Eric he had to go to the fire—and then I talked to my dad and my siblings on their cell phones at the scene.” Ethan eventually went to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. He thought, among other things, about the last time he had been in the house. That had been the previous Christmas (he and his wife, Kimberley, had not been able to come home on Thanksgiving), and, before leaving that day, he had walked through every room. The decision had been made to sell, and he knew, he said, that it likely would be the last opportunity he’d have to spend time there. Now, as the house burned, he thought of those sun-splashed rooms blackened with smoke.

The next morning, he went online to a Twin Cities TV station’s website and watched the house’s demolition.

At 3:21 p.m., on December 1—almost twenty hours after the MFD’s arrival—the “last unit,” in departmental language, finally “cleared” the area. All told, about forty firefighters using fifteen rigs and other pieces of firefighting aparatus battled the West Isles blaze. Beyond all accounting, of course, was the toll taken on the neighborhood and family. The Balcos house was a total loss. After an inspection by investigators from both the fire and police departments, the fire’s cause was deemed accidental—the malfunctioning of the electrical circuitry beneath the laundry room in the rear of the house. “Old wiring, bad luck,” in Eileen’s words.

“You never really get used to it,” Bleskachek, a firefighter for seventeen years, said two weeks later. “Professionally, you’re thinking about what you need to do to find and knock down the fire. Afterward, when you’re picking up and you see things in the rubble—things that have washed out of the building, things that once meant something to someone—that’s really sad. Here, there were Christmas decorations—ornaments, wreaths, lights. I don’t know if they had already been put up or not. Anyway, they had been washed out by all the water. I saw them on the sidewalk.”

The Balcoses gathered the next morning at Manny and Ophelia’s town home. Eric had already gone back to the big house to see if he could salvage his 1964 Volkswagen convertible, which had been stored in the double garage at the side of the house. The car was covered with a tarp, and the garage had not collapsed on top of it, “so I cleared a path through the debris in the driveway, fired it up, and drove out,” Eric said with a grin several months later. “The firefighters then said everything was going to be torn down, so if we’re going to get anything else from the house, we’d better be quick.” Eric called the family at the town home, “and everybody came over.”

What they found was a rank-smelling nightmare vision of what had once been their home. The roof and one of the walls had come down. Water was dripping from the skeletal remains. Virtually everything was coated with ice. Because most of the fire had been concentrated in the house’s sturdy walls, much of the visible contents hadn’t burned. Most of the house was inaccessible beneath the collapsed roof. But, luckily, given their central position in thirty-two years worth of family life, the three rooms in the best shape were the living room, dining room, and kitchen. The fire department had ordered a demolition, but one of the officials on-site happened to be the son of a patient of one of Manny’s colleagues and granted the family some time to salvage what they could. “Disbelief” was the overriding emotion, but, said Edwin, “we were in a salvage mode, not trying to think about much else.”

“We pretty much cleared out the kitchen and dining room,” Eydie said later. “Silverware and glasses—we took it whether it was valuable or not, because it was Mom’s.” Other recovered items included a china cabinet, several antiques, some artwork from the Philippines, and the large mahogony dining room table, around which Manny, Ophelia, and all of the siblings except Ethan sat on a summer afternoon talking about the fire. Everything they recovered had to be cleaned and restored, but at least a few precious possessions remained. Even so, more than seven months after the fire, family members could not talk about their loss without tears. “I still expect to drive by and look up at the house,” Eileen said, her eyes shining.

The strangely vacant lot had drawn a great deal of attention in the weeks and months after the fire. The sun had scarcely cleared the horizon on the morning of December 1 when Bruce Birkeland, a real estate broker who lives nearby, received the first of several calls inquiring about the space. Birkeland, various Realtors, and other neighbors have since acknowledged widespread concern about the site’s future—more specifically, in Birkeland’s words, the fear that “something inappropriate, something significant but not tasteful” might be built there. Because it was a double lot, some callers were nervous about the prospect of two possibly “inappropriate” structures. Because there was no Historic District restrictions, almost anything within residential zoning parameters was possible. Whatever would go up on such a prominent point on the parkway would be noticed, for better or worse.

The Balcoses, dealing with insurance issues and other red tape, did not put the property up for sale until the end of June. The asking price was about $1.5 million. Meantime, family members made frequent trips to the site. Early one morning a few days after the fire, Eric dropped his wife, Hope, off at work, then decided to drive past the lot. To his surprise, Edwin’s car was parked in front of it. “He was shoveling snow,” Eric said months later. “It was still dark out, he was shoveling snow, and he was bawling. I thought he’d lost it. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he wanted to rescue Dad’s NordicTrak from the rubble. I said, ‘Dude, the NordicTrak is gone’—and then we both stood there in the dark and cried.”

Ethan, in North Carolina, visited often via what he described as extremely vivid dreams. In many of the dreams, the house was still there. One night, he dreamed that he and his family had somehow been able to move back in after the fire, but then the house began to burn again. “I guess it’s like dreaming about somebody after a death,” he said.

In May, he returned in the flesh for the second time (he had come home at Christmas), and everyday for two weeks he returned, often in the company of siblings and in-laws, and executed a painstaking salvage effort of his own. Ever since he had been a kid, he had been the family gardener, with primary responsibility for the creation and care of the large beds of perennials and other flora that surrounded the house. After the fire, there was nothing left of the gardens adjacent to the house, but there was plenty in what was once the backyard and the beds that he had planted along Sheridan. Hosta had been one of Ethan’s favorites—huge blue varieties such as Elegans, Frances Williams, and Halcyon—and there were “tons” of peonies, dahlias, day lilies, and other plants as well. In two weeks, he and his helpers moved hundreds of the plants to his parents’ town home and the yards of siblings, friends, and neighbors. After digging out the last of the salvageable plants, he sat in the dirt and sobbed.

In early July, Bill and Michelle Pohlad purchased the houseless property from the Balcoses. Pohlad, best known beyond West Isles as one of Carl’s sons and the producer of Brokeback Mountain, is popular with the neighbors and, by several accounts, a happy choice for the property’s ownership. “You could almost hear the sighs of relief,” said a real estate broker familiar with the area. “Everybody knows the Pohlads will put up something nice.”  

A few days before the sale was completed, Eileen called her siblings. The family had always been close, but since the fire they had grown closer. For several weeks immediately afterward, all the siblings but Ethan gathered daily to commiserate, divvy up the insurance paperwork and other obligations, and simply “be together.” Now, on the second weekend in July, Eileen organized a picnic on the empty lot above West Isles Parkway. Not surprisingly, everybody showed up. Even Ophelia, who hadn’t been back to the site since Thanksgiving, was there, “just,” as she put it, “to say goodbye.”

The site was mostly dirt, with patches of grass still visible, a few bits of charred wood here and there, some damaged trees and shrubs, and the flagpole on which the family sometimes raised the colors of the Philippines, leading passersby to wonder if the big structure was an embassy. Nevertheless, the family made the most of the occasion. They sat on blankets and lawn chairs, ate sandwiches, and took pictures. Neighbors stopped by and said hello.

It was a warm, dry day. The sun was shining. And the view, as always, was beautiful.