New Haven Independent

“I hate to see old buildings go, but I couldn’t look at this as an old building. I had to look at it as unsafe or it wasn’t,” explained Rizzo Wednesday before the demolition, eying the century-old building standing half-crumbling at the corner of Orange and George streets. “I was in there this morning, I heard a few creaks, a few bricks fell, and I thought, you know what? I’m not going to take the chance. I determined it was a risk I didn’t want to take to public safety and welfare.”

The two-story building became a live risk Monday night, when the back half of it collapsed. Brief conversations over whether the front half might be fortified and preserved left it that way until Wednesday. Rizzo ruled it couldn’t. At 3 p.m. Wednesday, the A.A.I.S. demolition crew stood ready.

When dust-reducing water hoses had arrived, it was the beginning of the end for the old carriage house at 11 Orange. A.A.I.S.’s excavator, fixed with a demolition claw or “grapple” attachment, ripped up a chain-link fence, tossed it aside, and bit into the building like it was a gingerbread house. It punctured hungrily through the roof and finished off the collapsed back wall with the crunch of second-floor window glass. Then it stretched its neck and ventured into the belly of the building, pulling out the rotted wood of collapsed internal framing, like a T-Rex gutting its kill.

Over the ragged far wall, the claw hovered delicately, taking care to pull brick away from and not toward the neighboring four-story Trader’s Block building.

But never mind: soon the parking-lot side wall bowed, buckled, and came down with the whole building after it, sending two A.A.I.S men jumping backward, and blinding dust billowing up to the heights of the Coliseum.

Whoa, was that supposed to happen?!

“I didn’t want it to. I wanted to keep picking it apart. It was that weak!” said A.A.I.S’s Bill Knowlton (pictured beside the rubble pile at the top of this story).

“That’s how fragile it was,” said a vindicated Rizzo. “How could I take that chance?”

When the dust finally cleared, the excavator sat with its head hung at the foot of a pile of rubble, and looked almost sorry.

“See, there’s no bonding left,” said Joseph Simeone (pictured) of Simeone & Constantini, the architects slotted to rebuild the site, pulling two bricks apart in his hands to display the shot mortar. “Normally you’d get five, six, eight of them stuck together. There’s no lime putty left.”

Lime putty or no lime putty, preservationists like Town Green Special Services District’s Scott Healy were sad to see the building go. He gave respect to the city for “doing what it needed to do,” but offered none for the building’s owners, Fred and Kimmy Leaf. They fell down, Healy said, on responsibilities of stewardship that come with owning historic buildings.

“No one wanted to see this happen,” said Healy, who’d held out hope that “someone more preservation-minded” would buy come along and buy the building. He pointed out nearby buildings of equal age — the old firehouse-turned bar on Crown Street, the neighboring architecture offices, the Trader’s Block building on Orange, the Grave cigar building behind — that had been given “new life” with restoration work, denied the 11 Orange building now just a pile of rubble in their midst.

“You wouldn’t have to have to kick out any bricks,” said Healy. If you want to destroy a building “you leave the roof unrepaired, you leave doors and windows on both floors opened, you fail to enclose and mothball the building.” That, said Healy, is what happened at 11 Orange. “There is a record of multiple delays in responding to issues at the site, even though [owner] Kimmy Leaf’s photo studio is a block away.”

“There are two kinds of neglect: plain old neglect, and willful neglect. Was this willful neglect? I don’t know. Was this neglect? Yes. That’s my frustration.”

“I always scratch my head when someone buys a building in an historic district, when their program for their space is such that their building is never going to fit. It just doesn’t add up.”

The implication was that the Leafs were just waiting for the building’s collapse to go forward with plans to build a new four-story building in its stead. The architects from Simeone and Constantini Architects wouldn’t comment on what was on the drafting table for the site. They’ll get going, said Marco Constantini, “If they ever approve something!” The company has been involved since 2000, through battles with neighbors and historians over what protections applied. “I don’t know what the plan is,” said Joseph Simeone, who said they’d been asked by the Leafs to defer questions to their lawyer, Marjorie Shanskey. She couldn’t be reached for comment.

“I can’t imagine that he’s not happy that [the building] came down by itself,” said Amie Ziner, who came to collect her car. She was happy, too — with memories none too fond about the building under the watch of the squatter who had occupied it for years. “That alley was full of excrement. It was a problem building: It was not an asset to the neighborhood.”

A worker in maroon Ninth Square District services uniform disagreed. “This was all a historic part of New Haven.” Nostalgic about a building he remembered from Wilbur Cross High School days as part of the bus station, he wasn’t convinced it couldn’t have been saved. “I would’ve imagined they would have had another option, don’t you think?”

Mary Chin and her mom A Shio Chin (pictured), from Royal Palace Chinese restaurant across the street, sided with Ziner. “The building was so nasty!” said Mary Chin. “We need a new. Nobody likes old stuff. Everybody likes new.”

Her neighbors, the Iamunno family from the jeweler’s directly across from the demolition site, were equally unsentimental. “Eyesore. Take it down,” said Dan Iamunno. “We’re ready not to look at it.”

Afterwards, Trader’s Block residents (pictured below) celebrated over coffees at Woodlawn up the street. “The coliseum is next!”

Among them, just Terrence Arjo (at left) was sad to see the building go. “It would have been a great bar, with a German beer garden in the back.”

Owner Fred Leaf (right) said he had “no comment at this juncture,” as to what’s coming next, or to the charges of neglect. “I’m not going to go off” like some others, he said. “I’m just glad no one was hurt.”