The Selective Insurance Corp.’s lawsuit against Allen Street Development and the LLC’s owners bears watching in a city where a fair share of old industrial properties suffer from lack of maintenance while awaiting a new use.

The insurance company says embers and smoke from the fire spread from 1061 Allen St. to the Artone building before the fire was extinguished. Selective Insurance Company paid $1,271,668.33 to or on behalf of Artone for damages resulting from the fire. Now, the insurance company is looking to recoup those costs from Allen Street Development LLC, Richard J. Rusiniak and Patricia Rusiniak.

“The fire was a direct, proximate and foreseeable result of (Allen Street Development’s) breaches of its common law duties to act with reasonable care, as described above,” Hogan said.

How the state Supreme Court handles this lawsuit bears watching. City officials had tried prior to the fire to spur Allen Street Development to do more to secure the building and remove possible environmental contaminants on the property. Eight months before the fire that destroyed the building and resulted in damage to neighboring Artone, city officials called attention to the fact that Allen Street Development had been cited several times by Larry Scalise, the city’s building and zoning code enforcement officer, for a bevy of violations including for junk and debris and for failure to renovate or demolish.

The problem, as attorneys for Selective Insurance Corp. note in their complaint, is that Allen Street Development was always undercapitalized, so there was no money to do the type of work the city was ordering to be done. It’s not as if the city hadn’t called attention to possible issues with the building. Quite the contrary, the city did everything but take out a billboard in the months before the fire. But one can’t get blood from a stone.

That’s why the lawsuit is interesting. The city was unable to force changes before the 2022 fire. But a hefty court-required reimbursement could send a strong message to those in a similar situation that it’s time to either sell their buildings or demolish them before they are hit with a similar fine if something happens to their derelict remnant of Jamestown’s past.

It will be an interesting case to follow over the coming months.