New Haven Independent

According to records, New Haven’s Neighborhood Housing Services purchased King’s infamous 274 Edgewood Avenue property — ostensibly in a short sale with a bank threatening foreclosure — for $82,500 last month. Now, as Jim Paley, the organization’s executive director, put it in an interview, “we’re clearing up a neighborhood eyesore and providing an opportunity for a first-time buyer as well.”

It’s that first objective that neighbors are celebrating most. Depending on who was asked, the property could be described as sober house, a one-family house, a rooming house, even a drug house. But for King, police, and residents near the intersection of Edgewood and Platt Street, 274 simply spelled trouble.

King, who acquired the home in August 2006 for $265,000 — that’s more than $180,000 higher than the price Neighborhood Housing paid — said he originally planned to transform it into a so-called sober house.

No luck. The rules were disobeyed; the papers never filed. But more troubling for King, the pricey purchase led directly to his fall from grace as a member of the Board of Aldermen (and chairman of its Public Safety Committee) last year.

On Friday, Dec. 22, 2006, King was arrested for allegedly pushing and choking his illicit girlfriend in a fight over a “Georgia” Hot Dog. As I explored at the time in this Yale Daily News report, the incident — regardless of who was telling the truth — may have been more intertwined with the dilapidated corner home than first met the public eye. (As Lt. Ray Hassett put it Wednesday, “everybody was calling the police for everything in that house.”)

And King’s troubles stretched deeper than assault charges, to which he ultimately pleaded guilty even while publicly maintaining his innocence, and restraining orders. In January 2007, the city investigated his properties, including 85 Sherman Ave., and began the process of seeking foreclosure because King owed back-taxes piling into the thousands.

By June, after the Livable City Initiative condemned the one-family home after finding 11 people inside amid unlivable conditions, 274 Edgewood (pictured), built in 1900, was vacant. Hassett said it more or less stayed that way ever since. Now, the officer hopes, it can be restored to its “original glory.”

Added next-door neighbor Bill Bixby, longtime outspoken advocate for a change of pace at the troubled site, “it’s a huge plus for this whole block.

“I mean it’s the eyesore, and it has been for a long time, possibly stretching back into the 1990s,” he said. “Having it… essentially restored by Neighborhood Housing Services is just going to be terrific.”

King could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A woman who picked up the phone to the home number he used as an alderman said, “I don’t think he wants to talk anymore.”

Last June, he told the Independent that the house took on a life of its own, becoming, in a word, a monster.

“I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” King said at the time. “The house was in chaos. We always had to call the police and report that drugs were in the house. Nothing was being done about it. The only thing I could do was shut it down.”

Paley said he expects the home, once renovated, to sell for “just under” $200,000. In fact, he predicted there will be a “waiting list” of potential owners lining up to make the purchase — ghosts not included.