New Haven Independent

Pinto, an officer with the city’s economic development department, had the unenviable — as he put it, “crummy” — task last week of informing business owners and residents on the north side of Chapel Street that they must prepare for the venerable Spector Building to join the Kresge in historic building heaven. The city was tearing it down because of damage from the Dec. 12 downtown fire and then an accident from the demolition of a building next door. So Pinto told the block’s denizens they had to close shop and scram on Wednesday and Thursday when the wrecking ball and claw did their work dropping huge chunks of the old structures down into the street.

The stores on Chapel between Orange and Church were open again Friday, and Pinto was doing a different piece of work he enjoyed far more. On his own, he gingerly picked up a number of the more well-preserved bricks from the huge pile that had spilled out from where the sidewalk had been onto the closed roadway.

“If we can save a little bit of history this way, that’s good,” he said. “The painted bricks are from the Kresge Building and the tile bricks from Spector.”

Pinto, a newly minted Quinnipiac University Law School graduate who recently joined the city’s economic development department, said he was not preserving the bricks in fulfillment of a directive from his office, or as a matter of policy.

As he lined up perhaps a dozen bricks on the bollards on the north side of Chapel, he said in fact that he was unaware of a policy in his department or the city regarding preservation of remnants of structures that are officially demolished. “So I couldn’t comment on that,” he said. “I do have a friend,” he added “who is a collector of such things from the buildings, for example, that were razed in the creation of Ninth Square. One of these may be for him, or they may go to the historical society. I don’t know.”

For now he was putting them away for safe keeping. Then he looked wistfully back at the Spector Building. “It’s really rotted out in there,” he said, “as far as I could see.”

During the demolition of the Kresge building on Jan. 4, a structural beam of the building between Kresge and Spector gave way and slammed into the Spector building. So Livable City Initiative (LCI) chief Andy Rizzo declared the buildings in danger of collapse.

Despite legal protestations and angry words from the Kresge’s owner (click here for an account in the Register; click here to read letters from an ongoing dispute with City Hall), and the Hahn family, which operated Concord 9 jewelry at the site, the order was given.

(Even before the accident, city officials trying to get the Spector building demolished, but its owner, the Hahn family, was trying to stop them. Click here to read a letter to that effect.)

Andy Rizzo, chief of city government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI), said that the heavy rains on Friday helped with the demolition work.

“We always hose down the debris on our own, because it keeps down the dust. With the rain, it was like having an additional hose, and a big one, from heaven.”

By day’s end Friday, Rizzo said most of the Spector building and remains of Kresge were taken down. The dump trucks driven by guys like Bryan Milliron (pictured above), for the L.G. Trucking Company, headquartered in Pennsylvania, were not able, however, to maneuver into place to begin to scoop up the debris. The schedule called for the trucks to do the removal beginning Saturday, carting the remains of Kresge and Spector directly to a dump site, Milliron, said, south of Akron, Ohio.

Plaques in French

What else had Pinto seen inside the rubble that had stirred his historical sense?

“There were remains of some meeting room up there, in a room with a printed tin ceiling. I saw some plaques or signs in French, some kind of French-American Club from I don’t know when, 35 or 50 years ago, long gone. I’m just trying to do something, personally,” he added, “so that these buildings, though lost, are not forgotten.”

An Ad Hoc Pursuit

Reached by email, Bill Hosley, the director of the New Haven Museum, stated, “Over the years we have collected fragments of Sachem’s Wood, the Old State House, Benedict Arnold House and more. And one of our early leaders, George Dudley Seymour, rarely missed a chance to preserve evidence of great buildings being lost in his time. Yes, we need a better way of meeting this need today. We’re always happy to speak with developers or preservationists when demolition becomes inevitable — either to document what’s being lost for our photography collection and archives or to acquire evocative building fragments.”

Robert Grzywacz, who has just stepped down form nine years leading the city’s Historic District Commission, added: “Artifact preservation is very ad hoc. I don’t think there is any specific policy. Architectural artifacts tend to be big and bulky and need a place to be stored which neither the City nor the New Haven Museum really has. The New Haven Preservation Trust investigated salvage in the case of the demolition of the Yale Boathouse. The conclusion at that time was that there was no place to store decorative items and that finding a home for them was unlikely.”

Meanwhile, Kyle Dugdale, an associate at Knight Architecture (798 Chapel St.), preserved the photographic record with these pictures of the demolition in progress, complete with captions:

The end is nigh.

Clutching at “1911” inscription on pediment.

Trophy secured.

Lowered to ground.

Turned over by men in helmets.

Paying respects.

As skies darken over lower Chapel Street…