Paul Bass Photos
Preservationist Greenberg reaches for a 19th century prize in rubble.
Turcio: “We don’t pay a dime.”
The city sought to have an historic downtown building demolished in 2011 — four years before it started crumbling and had to be razed in the middle of the night.
An emergency crew demolished the building, at 808 – 810 Chapel St. at the corner of Orange, late Sunday into Monday after the roof caved in and bricks began tumbling onto the sidewalk.
Svigals & Associates
Design for new building on lot.
Click here for a full story on that.
The bill for the demolition will come to more than $100,000, according to property owner Paul Denz. He told the Independent Monday that he negotiated the price Sunday night as the demolition proceeded with Abcon Environmental, whose crew carried it out.
Denz lost another building on the same block to a fire in 2007. The city also ordered that building demolished; in that case, Denz contested the city decision and took it to court to seek to have the government pay for the demolition. The two sides eventually negotiated a settlement.
The ruins, as of Monday.
The 808 – 810 Chapel demolition will be different. Denz said Monday that he will cover the cost himself; his insurance agent informed him that the cost will probably not be covered by his insurer.
“My agent says building collapses are not covered,” he said. “This bill is going to come to me. I’m not going to go after the city; the bill is ultimately my bill. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“We don’t pay a dime,” declared city Building Official Jim Turcio, who condemned the building Sunday night and ordered its emergency demolition. Monday, Turcio (who had stayed up all night) drew up retroactive paperwork for the formal demolition order. At a City Hall press conference, he spoke of how he and Fire Marshal Bobby Doyle plan to inspect all commercial buildings in the city, beginning with abandoned ones, to seek to avoid similar near-collapses.
First Order In 2007
The excavator knocks out the building’s walls Sunday night.
Denz had planned to demolish the 808 – 810 Chapel building anyway; he has a memorandum of understanding with the city to purchase the vacant lot next to the building, and he plans to build a a singe new building on both lots, with around 45 apartments above 10,000 square feet of first-floor retail. (A preliminary rendering appears above in this article.) But he planned to have financing for that project cover the demolition cost, he said.
The city in fact had been seeking the building’s demolition for years, according to a review of the property’s file at the Building Department.
It first ordered it demolished in 2007, until repairs were made. Former City Building Official Andrew Rizzo issued a second Unsafe Notice & Order to Demolish order on June 16, 2011.
Denz’s Corner Block Develpoment LLC did not yet own the property then. A limited liability corporation called 810 Chapel Bapaz, run by Robin Mokhtar of Great Neck, N.Y., did. In 2012, Denz was negotiating with Mokhtar to buy the property.
On Feb. 12, 2012 Denz wrote an email message to Rizzo and Frank D’Amore of the Livable City Initiative, City Hall’s anti-blight and property inspection agency.
“As you are aware,” he wrote, “I am attempting to purchase 808 Chapel Street … A recent title search of the property indicates an ‘unsafe notice and order to demolish’ dated June 28, 2011 and signed by Andy. My title company will not allow me to close on the property until the notice has been satisfied or removed. I believe that if I could get a formal letter indicating that, upon condition of satisfying the work proposed by Red Rooster, the order and that the fines associated with the order, would be rescinded, then I could satisfy the title company requirement to close.”
Rizzo obliged five days later with a letter to Denz promising that “upon completion of the construction services proposed by Red Rooster Construction Company, Inc., the order will be rescinded.”
The sale closed on March 27, 2012, according to land records Denz and partner Chris Vigilante bought the property for $300,000.
A Jan. 25, 2012, letter on file from Red Rooster Construction listed extensive promised repairs, including filling all windows with plywood, constructing walls, fixing the roof, including framing it with rafters. The total cost of the work was set at $23,127.
Fast forward more than three years, to Sunday night’s collapse. It began, according to Turcio, when the roof collapsed, loosing bricks and pushing a front and side wall out, then “pancaking” onto floors below. Turcio made it out of the building by a mere 15 minutes Sunday night before a third-story cornice crashed down; he said it’s lucky no one ended up being hurt in general before the building was razed.
Assistant Fire Chief Matthew Marcarelli and Mayor Harp at Monday’s press conference.
“New Haven is an old city. That is an asset,” Mayor Toni Harp said at Monday’s press conference. “It is also a challenge. … We are blessed that no one was hurt all day long.”
“We can attribute this failure to neglect and decay.”
The Building Department file contains no evidence that all the promised 2012 work was done, according to Turcio. He said Red Rooster’s owner died during the work. He also said the roof was in terrible shape, which is what caused Sunday’s imminent collapse.
Denz Monday said promised work was done. The crew boarded windows and “re-roofed a large part of it. The whole back section of the roof was missing. We re-roofed the back section” and “patched the rest.”
So what went wrong?
“Time and water,” Denz said, “have a way of degrading a building.”
The city plans to close the bus stop next to 808 – 810 Orange the rest of the week so crews can clear the rubble and fix the sidewalk.
Meanwhile, curious onlookers were drawn to the pile of rubble. Ninth Square preservationist Robert Greenberg poked through the debris in a hunt for treasure.
“This is history!” he declared as he extracted “a window lintel from the 1840s” from the rubble. “I get a brick from everything that’s been destroyed in this town.
“This is upsetting,” he continued. “I knew it was going to happen.” He blamed “neglect” for the building’s demise. He said the owner should have preserved it while it could be preserved.
And then when Mr. Greenburg gets cut on that window will he sue the town?