Thomas Breen photos
189 Dwight St., target of LCI fine.
Scott Healy.
The owner of an historic Dwight Street home that has sat empty and derelict for two years has teamed up with a local architectural designer and historian to restore the property to its architectural roots.
Scott Healy, the former executive director of the Town Green Special Services District, owns the four-family, two-story home at 189 Dwight St. on a residential block around the corner from Amistad Academy that is lined with mid-19th century and early-20th century houses.
A former chair of the Dwight Community Management Team and one of the co-founders of the New Haven Urban Design League, Healy bought the home in 1999. He lived on the second floor while renting out the building’s two ground floor rooms until he moved to Chicago for graduate school in 2008. He now splits his time between Chicago and New Haven, taking some of the money he makes as a management consultant and pouring it into repair and restoration projects in the Dwight Street home, he said.
In January 2016, right as Healy had gathered enough money to fund a new HVAC system and a comprehensive rehabilitation of the property’s roof, one of the pipes on the second floor burst and flooded the entire house. Healy was in Boston visiting his family, and had recently discontinued the rentals in anticipation of the major renovations he had planned for the roof and heating.
“It looked like someone dumped a waterfall into the house,” Healy said as he remembered rushing back to the house two years ago to find water still trickling from the front door into the street.
For the past two years, Healy said, he has been wrestling with his insurance company and slowly refilling his coffers to fund his planned restoration of the building. He said that he is reluctant to sell the home to one of the city’s major real estate developers out of fear that they would have little interest in preserving the building’s architectural history and design and connection to the rest of the neighborhood.
Rotting wooden shingles reveal vertical siding just beneath the facade of 189 Dwight St.
But his forbearance has meant that the house has been unoccupied for the past two years. The paint on the façade’s wooden shingles is peeling; rotten wood lines the building’s exterior. In September, the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative, cited Healy for the dilapidated exterior. In December it issued a $6,100 fine for not following through on required repairs.
“It breaks my heart how I’ve had to postpone work on this house simply because I couldn’t afford it,” Healy said.
He said now he has saved up enough money to truly begin the renovation and restoration process. Working with local architectural designer, historian and entrepreneur Colin Caplan, Healy has pulled an exploratory demolition permit on the site. He said that he and Caplan just have to pull the trigger on which contractor to go with to complete a structural analysis of the building before they can begin to map out and implement the rest of their restoration plans.
Healy said that he could be living in the home in as soon as a few weeks, depending on the results of the structural analysis. He said that the variable that’s more difficult to predict is just how much time and work and money will be required to restore the building to what Caplan described as its “historic glory.”
The wave-like ornamentation atop 189 Dwight St.’s facade.
City land records identify 189 Dwight St. as being built in 1920, but Caplan concluded that the actual construction date is much earlier based on the building’s appearance on an 1859 map of New Haven.
Caplan said his research shows that the house was built in 1853 by George Baldwin Woodruff, a prominent joiner and pattern maker and the London sales representative for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Caplan said Woodruff eventually sold the house to Oliver F. Winchester, who likely bought it as an investment.
During a recent tour of the building’s exterior and interior, Healy and Caplan pointed out the different structural elements that make 189 Dwight St. unique.
Caplan explained that the house was built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural style, which privileges ornamental, jig-sawn details like the wave-like wooden latticework that top the building’s façade.
He said that vertical board and batten siding likely comprise the building’s exterior, hidden just beneath the peeling wooden shingles which were applied in the 1920s.
“We want to explore whether it’s feasible to take out the 100-year-old shingles and get to the 150-year-old core,” Caplan said. He cited 33 Beers St., a property that he helped restore as a high school student working with Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) in the mid-1990s, as a successful nearby example of a restored and revived Carpenter Gothic home.
“It was meant to be seen,” Caplan said about the ornamental details, some still visible, some hidden, on the building’s façade. “It was meant to be a showpiece. The faces of these buildings were the representations of their owners.”
Healy shows off the diamond-framed windows on the ground floor of 189 Dwight St.
Inside the building, he and Healy pointed out the myriad mid-19th century details peeking out beneath the sustained wreckage caused by the water pipe burst and subsequent demolition.
An octagonal bay on the northern edge of the home retained its heart pine hardwood floor and diamond-framed window panes.
Colin Caplan describes the arched windows and glass panes that date back to the mid-19th century.
Arched windows in the entryway still held a few glass panels that Caplan said were likely from the 1850s, based on the waves, bubbles and imperfections.
The spiral stairwell inside 189 Dwight St.
“This stairwell is one of the most unique stairwells I’ve ever seen in New Haven,” he said, pointing to a spiral wooden stairwell that spun 180 degrees as it climbed from the first to the second floor. “This would have been quite an elegant stairwell in a working-class neighborhood.”
On the second floor, Healy and Caplan pointed out where the water leak happened, but also the demarcation line in the home’s cruciform layout between the original 19th century building and a later addition.
“Every homeowner could take a lesson from Scott,” Caplan said in regards to Healy’s determination about how much to invest in historical restoration on top of the more immediate costs of making the home safe, stable and habitable. “That’s the passion versus the business sense,” he said.
“People always tell me to accept one of the offers to buy the house,” Healy said. “That the restoration work is a huge undertaking. It is. But I want this to be a house where people walk by and say, ‘Wow, this is what makes my neighborhood special.’”
Healy and Caplan look out through a second story window at 189 Dwight St.
Hero? Or Slumlord?
The road to hell is paved with fine intentions.
How much money has Healy put back into that property over the past almost two decades? Versus how much money he has taken out?
Besides selling to larger concerns, Scott Healy could actually sell his decaying house to a responsible homeowner. One whole would live in the house and actively maintain it...