Chicago firefighters work the scene of a large fire on West Montrose Avenue at North Richmond Street in the Albany Park neighborhood on Feb. 21, 2022. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

When an extra-alarm blaze in Albany Park left one person seriously injured and destroyed a popular brewery Monday, embattled landlord Gary Carlson said he knew fingers would point toward his apartment building.

And it wasn’t without some reason.

The city last year sued Carlson over exterior conditions at the North Richmond Street property, noting that inspectors could not get inside the two-story building, public records show. Three months later, on a Cook County judge’s orders, city inspectors visited again and found fire safety violations inside the property, including a common stairway devoid of smoke detectors.

Throughout the building, inspectors also found defective light fixtures and no emergency lighting, which they labeled “dangerous and hazardous.” A judge ordered Carlson to put in working smoke detectors within 24 hours and fix the electrical issues by the next court date, scheduled for last Thursday, four days before the extra-alarm fire.

A car is buried in bricks after a fire in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood on Feb. 21, 2022. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)

After initially suggesting the fire started in the apartment building, the Chicago Fire Department later clarified that the point of origin appeared to be between Carlson’s property and a neighboring business. The popular brewery Twisted Hippo was largely reduced to rubble after a series of explosions could be heard inside the building during the blaze. An obstacle course gym called Ultimate Ninjas was also destroyed and dozens of people forced out of their homes.

A man, estimated to be about 60 years old, was taken to Swedish Hospital in serious condition for smoke inhalation, officials said. No other injuries were reported.

Officials initially said that eyewitnesses described the fire starting at the apartment building, then spreading next door to the brewery around 4 a.m. and requiring roughly 150 firefighters. Carlson said he has his own eyewitness accounts insisting the fire began elsewhere.

The cause remained under investigation late Monday night.

“Of course, they’re saying it started at my building,” Carlson said. “I’m 70 years old, and I don’t have a friend in the world.”

Carlson told the Tribune that he hired an electrician to handle the city code violations, but he said he didn’t know if there had been a follow-up inspection or if the building had passed.

“Let me tell you how it works,” he said. “No matter how many things you fix, the city comes up with all new stuff.”

He provided the name and phone number for an electrician who he said handled the repairs. The electrician, Richard Stepaniak, told a Tribune reporter that he attended the city inspection and handled everything on the inspector’s list, with the exception of installing the fire detectors. A Carlson employee handled that job, he said.

“They gave me a list of things to do, and it wasn’t that serious,” Stepaniak said.

A co-owner of Twisted Hippo, Marilee Rutherford, said Monday afternoon she hadn’t had time to process what happened.

The brewery prided itself on eccentric beers and had a $15 minimum hourly wage for staff when it opened in 2019. Its owners also hoped to succeed in a seemingly unlucky location that had seen a revolving door of three prior breweries in the three years preceding their opening.

The establishment was “surviving by the skin of our teeth” in the pandemic, but Rutherford said she is still hoping to support employees as much as possible. In the hours following the fire, the Chicago beer community rallied behind the brewery, quickly raising more than $46,000 through a GoFundMe campaign.

Alex Borrayo, a chef who said he helped found Twisted Hippo almost four years ago, said seeing the rubble at the place he helped conceptualize from “pen and paper” stages was “just a little unbelievable.”

“I had to come down here to see it for myself,” Borrayo said, before walking across the street to hug Rutherford.

Neighbors expressed shock Monday afternoon, gathering to watch as heavy construction equipment marked with Department of Streets and Sanitation seals scooped up bricks and debris from North Richmond. At least three cars were crushed by bricks where one of the brewery’s walls appeared to have been blown out, and were towed away with some of the bricks still on the hoods.

People at the site of the fire said the gym and brewery had been welcoming gathering places in the community.

Neighbors described waking up to what sounded like explosions around 4 a.m.

“It’s really kind of unsettling … The wind was roaring,” said Donna Schober, a resident of nearby Ravenswood Manor.

Carlson, for his part, said the fire will not change the way he operates his rental business.

The owner of an estimated 80 properties on the North Side, Carlson’s various buildings have been plagued by violence and hundreds of code violations. Just last August, his properties came up in a police meeting, where officials noted they had “thousands of pages of calls, incidents, arrests” involving his residents.

In 2019, a Chicago firefighter was shot outside one of his other Albany Park buildings, which Carlson said made him a target of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration. Carlson said city inspectors have retaliated against him ever since, constantly citing him for code violations.

“They just come up with all this stuff,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Chicago’s buildings department did not respond to a request for comment. The city, however, has been citing Carlson’s buildings for code violations long before Lightfoot came into office.

In 2016, the Better Government Association and the Sun-Times published an investigation looking into the hundreds of code violations leveled against Carlson. And state Rep. Jaime Andrade, a former aide to retired-Ald. Dick Mell who now represents Albany Park in the General Assembly, says his dealings with Carlson’s properties go back more than two decades.

Andrade said Carlson provides much needed affordable housing in the neighborhood, but that the troubling landlord’s track record cannot be denied. He intends to speak with city officials this week to determine what can be done, including whether they could require Carlson to hire more employees to care for his buildings.

“There have been concerns about safety issues related to his properties for 20 to 30 years,” Andrade said. “It’s past time something be done about it.”