Up in Smoke

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.