Bowman Street is a quiet two-block strip in an easily overlooked pocket of a neighborhood on the city’s east side.
It’s a tight-knit community. Neighbors can be seen chatting from porches, waving from the sidewalk as they pass by, and keeping an eye on the handful of houses falling into disrepair. In one of those houses, 110 Bowman St., roughly halfway between Atlantic Avenue and East Main Street, James Bradley made a home.
Bradley, a heavyset man in his early 60s, lived alone.
“James was delightful,” said Sunshine Jacobs, a member of the Atlantic-Culver-East Main, or ACE, neighborhood association. “He loved Harry Potter. He was a gentleman.”
What troubled Jacobs was the shabby 2 ½-story house where Bradley rented his first-floor apartment. The property exemplified Rochester’s struggles with an aging housing stock and a subset of landlords unable or unwilling to invest in upkeep.
The administration’s get-tough approach to ensure affordable housing is also safe and habitable translated to multiple citations for problems at Bowman Street. And while it’s not clear what could have saved Bradley, what is clear is that those efforts to maintain the property proved ineffective.
“When we were there on Thursday delivering food, he was telling me all about a book he was listening to,” Jacobs recalled. “And he said, 'If you’d like to come back, I can tell you more about it. He was so excited.
“And I said, ‘Does anybody visit you?’ and he said, ‘Oh no, not often.’”
The day after that conversation, just before midnight, a fire broke out at the Bowman Street house. Bradley was rescued from the building but died later that night at Strong Memorial Hospital.
Bradley has not been publicly identified as the victim by the Rochester Fire Department due to an inability to locate next of kin. His identity has been verified through conversations with multiple neighbors.
A Fire Department spokesperson said the cause of the Oct. 25 fire was determined to be accidental and is thought to be electrical in nature — stemming from an extension cord in Bradley’s apartment.
Water, water, everywhere
Issues at Bowman Street, and the nine other city properties owned by landlord Terri Gatti, had been well-documented in the years leading up to the fire.
Gatti began buying properties in 2014 and had amassed her portfolio by the end of 2016. She bought the two-unit Bowman Street house in 2015 for $20,000, records show.
Today, she has accrued 236 code violations across all her properties, including 19 at Bowman Street. The city of Rochester has sued Gatti over four of her properties, with one, 590 Maple St., planned for demolition.
“The city can’t, or doesn’t have the clear authority, to say, ‘Landlord, you cannot rent in the city of Rochester,’” said Michael Furlano, housing attorney for the city of Rochester. “It’s more so about each individual property, so what we try to do, and what’s most effective, is to target the properties, and get the conjunctive relief (ordering a combination of remedies) for the landlord to make the repairs on the property.
“In 95% of cases, that’s exactly what happens,” Furlano added.
The Bowman Street house has not had a certificate of occupancy since 2022. Despite its large number of code violations, Gatti has received few penalties. In the past year, she has been fined $350 for failure to remedy any of the violations at the property.
A certificate of occupancy is given after an inspection that determines a home is fit for someone to live in. The absence of one does not legally prevent a landlord from renting.
In addition to having no certificate of occupancy, the issues range from missing gutters to broken stairs. Records show that Gatti’s water bill had not been paid since 2019. Furlano confirmed that the city received a complaint that the building had no water on Oct. 4, and it was remedied that same day.
Then, on Oct. 11, Jacobs sent a letter to the city’s Neighborhood Service Center, an agency which takes information directly from neighborhoods and helps connect them with city resources. The subject line of the email was “Water, water, everywhere.”
The email alleged that water was leaking from the upstairs apartment and draining through Bradley’s ceiling. In an interview, Jacobs said the water was coming through the light fixtures in Bradley’s kitchen.
“The bottom line for me is that someone needs to fix the water in a way that causes it to flow from the taps, and wastewater to drain through pipes, out of the house into the sewer,” Jacobs wrote to city officials.
She was one of Bradley’s only advocates. He had a troubled past.
In 2013, Bradly was convicted of negligent homicide and assault in the death of 7-year-old Sahmir Williams after he allegedly had a seizure while driving and veered his SUV into the ball field at School 33, striking Williams and another child. Prosecutors alleged he had a history of seizures and shouldn’t have been driving.
By 2024, he was blind and isolated socially.
‘I don’t know anything’
At the time of the fire, Bowman Street was occupied by Bradley in one apartment, and three men — Hubert Lewis, his adult son, and Samuel Green — in the other.
Lewis and his son relocated to a family member’s house, although Jacobs said they since have relocated to the Open Door Mission. Multiple neighbors confirmed Green had been sleeping on the porch of the house days after the fire. WXXI News was unable to locate any of the men. The American Red Cross, which responds to fire scenes to assure residents have adequate support, did not return a request for comment.
As for Gatti, the past year has found her in increasingly dire financial straits.
Foreclosure proceedings against the Bowman Street property began in March. Several other foreclosures and tax liens have been filed against Gatti in the past year. In August, she filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
Reached by phone, Gatti said she knew nothing about any of the issues at Bowman Street. She also declined to comment on the water issues the property had allegedly experienced.
“I don’t know anything, I’m the owner, but I don’t know, I don’t know anything about the water,” Gatti said.
Gatti said all of the properties are managed by her husband, Walter Gatti, and her health issues prevent her from actively being involved in her real estate portfolio.
Walter Gatti said the couple is planning on selling off their city properties. He blamed what he saw as the city’s punitive approach for making a tough situation worse, piling on court cases, code violations, and fines with little in the way of assistance to help remediate the problems.
The city offers home repair assistance – but not to property owners with code violations.
“We’re just tired, it’s a very excruciating point,” he said. “The city, all they know is ticket, ticket, ticket.”
Tenants not paying rent, or in one case operating an illegal auto repair business out of a house, exacerbated his fines and financial burden, he said.
His issues line up largely with those raised by property owners in a 2022 report from the city’s Housing Quality Taskforce.
“Significant challenges from the housing provider perspective included the difficulty of affording upkeep and improvements with relatively low rents, a perceived lack of tenant accountability for damage and inconsiderate behavior, and inconsistent or excessively harsh enforcement of code and other regulations,” that report reads.
The other side of the issue noted in the report is tenants living in substandard housing and neighborhoods hampered by blight.
Today, the Gatti properties are among the most distressed in Rochester. The city has a rental owner rating system that factors in code violations and property maintenance. Gatti is tied for the lowest-rated property owner in the city among those owning at least 10 properties.
“I'm devastated with a person that dies, it's devastating to hear that,” Terri Gatti said. “I feel bad, I really do, and there's nothing I could say about it.”
What to do
When Mayor Malik Evans hired Furlano in 2022, he announced the arrival of the city’s new housing attorney saying: “Negligent landlords need to know we mean business when we see violations that affect the quality of life of the people who live here.”
Furlano’s job was to go after the worst of the worst. He has filed dozens of lawsuits and demolition orders against the city’s worst properties and property owners. Among them was Meyer Hirschhorn, whose derelict properties had accumulated $131 million in fines from the city for code violations. Several of Hirschhorn’s properties are now facing possible demolition.
The scope of what the city can do is limited to penalties placed on bad landlords and preventing them from gathering more properties, Furlano said. Gatti, for example, is barred from purchasing more city properties out of foreclosure due to her immense number of code violations.
Furlano said that the city’s certificate of occupancy serves as a “stamp of approval” by the city for renting property. A certificate of occupancy in Rochester requires inspection every six years for renewal.
But not having one does not stop landlords from renting, he said. He was uncertain whose responsibility it is to pass laws that prevent derelict landlords from continuing to rent out homes.
“Where it gets unclear are with these issues with preemption, what can municipalities do versus what does the state govern?” Furlano said.
Furlano said the city’s role is largely holding landlords to account on specific properties, but limiting landlords from renting entirely is less feasible.
But it’s been done before.
In 2007, a fire at a rental property on Upton Park owned by Cataldo Arbore left two Rochester Institute of Technology students dead. In the aftermath, the city forced Arbore to vacate his remaining rental properties, citing their issues with code violations.
That move was made by Tom Richards, the city’s top lawyer at the time who later served as Rochester mayor.
The Bowman Street property is in City Councilmember Mary Lupien's district. A longtime housing advocate, she said she is in favor of creating a licensing system for landlords where their authorization to rent out houses and apartments can be rescinded if they fail to maintain their properties or create dangerous living conditions.
“They can still own the property, but they can’t rent it,” Lupien said. “Right now, you can be a landlord, and you can be in charge in someone’s home, and you can have zero experience.”
Days after the fire, the scent of char still lingered outside 110 Bowman St. In the back, discarded carpeting, clothes, and furniture were piled on the lawn. Plywood now covers the doors and windows. But on a recent afternoon the 3-foot by 6-foot board covering the front door was haphazardly propped up against the front porch railing.
For Jacobs, Bradley’s death was a tragedy that could have been averted.
“How is this acceptable, on any possible level?” she said.
