Chris Smith: Six huts that provided the homeless shelter are hauled away in Santa Rosa

At the order of City Hall, six handsome little huts were trucked off Sunday from alongside a commercial building north of Coddingtown.

For about a year and a half, the huts provided folks who are homeless with a place to sleep and store a few possessions.

But the city ordered the property owner, Dave Berto, to remove them or face fines. The essence of the city’s objection is that the 4- by 7-foot sleeping sheds violate building codes.

Berto, Homeless Action and Harold Wallin, builder of Harold’s Utilitarian Transitional Shelters, knew that. They were trying to act out of the box.

Berto concedes there were at times some problems, some “bad actors” in and around the small community of huts. But he asserts the arrangement was working quite well.

As the huts were trucked Sunday to land in the west county, 63-year-old Russ Samson, who’d felt secure while sleeping in one, posed whether the city officials who declared them unsafe really think “I’m going to be safer on the streets of Santa Rosa.”

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JAWS HAVE DROPPED at Michelle Marie’s Patisserie for 29 years, an involuntary response to the stunningly gorgeous cakes and pastries that flowed from the Montgomery Village bakery-cafe.

The shock comes now from the locked door and the sign: “Michelle Marie is retiring. Store is closed for business.”

I tried but didn’t connect with owner Michelle Marie Defors.

David Codding, who owns Montgomery Village, said Defors wants to spend more time with her family, more time not running a business. She tried to sell the patisserie, Codding said, but that didn’t work out so she shut it down.

Codding said that not long ago the operator of another French-style cafe inquired about moving into Montgomery Village, and Codding responded that two would be too many.

With the closing of Michelle Marie’s, Montgomery Village has gotten back in touch with that cafe owner. A deal is in the works for this second patisserie to take over the space ASAP.

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A PUMPKIN RETURNS: Mark and Lynn Trombetta had just placed a ceramic jack-o’-lantern outside their Bennett Ridge home last October when disaster struck.

The Trombettas’ place was incinerated. By a fluke, flames leaped the home of neighbors Les and Donna DeLaBriandais.

An artist, Donna for weeks stepped from her studio to sadly behold the charred ruins of her neighbors’ home, and the grinning pumpkin.

As the debris was about to be scooped up and hauled off, Donna walked over and took the pumpkin for safe-keeping.

“I didn’t know where it went,” Mark Trombetta said. With all that’s gone on this past year, the disappearance of a Halloween ornament didn’t amount to much.

Recently, the DeLaBriandaises saw the Trombettas were back on their parcel. Donna and Les strolled over to ask if Lynn and Mark would like to have a salvaged memento.

Donna gave them the pumpkin. The Trombettas lit up as though it was found treasure.

Mark likes that the decoration now wears ghoulish globs of melted glass that he presumes dripped from the porch light. “It looks very Halloween,” he said.

Work’s begun on a foundation for his and Lynn’s new home, and the garden’s coming along. Next Halloween, Jack will have something to grin about.

You can contact columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211.