Oakland "Ghost Ship" Warehouse Fire

off-topic conversation unrelated to Jane's Addiction
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Pandemonium
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Oakland "Ghost Ship" Warehouse Fire

#1 Post by Pandemonium » Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:42 am

I know this is somewhat old news, as the tragic (and entirely preventable) fire happened last Friday night killing at least 36 people. But after seeing photos of the inside of the warehouse which was more or less a loosely knit artist colony/commune before the fire, it struck me as a really cool place for creative people to hang out despite being in hindsight an obvious death trap. It's what I'd ideally imagine Janes working and living in back in the mid 80's.

http://www.oaklandghostship.com/

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I spent an evening in a very similar ratty warehouse in some industrial area in San Francisco back in '97 the long weekend I saw the Janes/ENIT Festival. I had met my friend who had just moved up there from SoCal and the first night I was there, we decided to go out looking for any kind of live music and wound up kind of getting lost and stumbling upon this place. Paid the cover, and it was like going through someone's home-made haunted house, only every day-glo painted room had a different band or "performance artist" playing in a corner crammed with maybe 30 people per room. In retrospect, had a fire broken out in that place, it would have been the same result as Ghost Ship - a lot of people trapped and dying.

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chaos
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Re: Oakland "Ghost Ship" Warehouse Fire

#2 Post by chaos » Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:57 am

This is heart-wrenching. When this first happened, the reports here were that an "after-hours" club caught fire. I didn't realize until a day or two later that it was an artists' community.

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Re: Oakland "Ghost Ship" Warehouse Fire

#3 Post by Pandemonium » Tue Dec 06, 2016 7:36 pm

chaos wrote:This is heart-wrenching. When this first happened, the reports here were that an "after-hours" club caught fire. I didn't realize until a day or two later that it was an artists' community.
It seems like it was a little bit of everything - artist's community, squalid low rent housing, party warehouse all ran by Derick Almena, who appears to be a opportunistic flake and will likely face serious charges and lawsuits in the near future. Aside from leasing and running the warehouse as a artist's studio, he essentially collected rent from multiple tenants, both inside and in trailers in the outside storage yard, as well as hosting and charging for parties, shows, raves, etc.

This is the flipside of the rather utopian photos I posted in this thread from the Ghost Ship website:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -died.html

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