Markeshia Ricks Photo
After neighbors helped quash plans to add another frat house to their street, Yale Crew members are now poised to move into a restored bright yellow and green Lake Place home.
Last year, Chi Psi Fraternity asked the city for a special exception to allow a seven-bedroom house for up to 12 people in a middle-density area at 13 Lake Place, behind the Payne-Whitney Gymnasium. It also requested a variance to allow a fraternity on land not owned by a university. San Antonio-based, New Haven Holdings LLC had purchased the property back in February 2014 for $90,000.
With neighbors up in arms against the move, the owner realized that the plan to move Chi Psi members in was going nowhere fast, and wanted out. The owner was hooked up with Carol Horsford (pictured), owner/broker for Farnam Realty, who bought the property in mid-November for exactly what the owner paid.
Contributed Photo
Horsford found a house with “good bones,” but one that had not been lived in for probably a decade. At one point the property was used as a haunted house for a fundraiser.
Horsford’s husband, Jesse, is the owner of Bluefin Properties LLC. He got busy soon after the purchase and the birth of their baby taking the house from rundown to “wow,” restoring original hardwood floors and decorative fireplaces on two of the floors, adding modern appliances and other amenities. The house is now separated into three, three-bedroom apartments.
The owners also decided to repaint the house yellow in honor of its previous owner, Sonia Butler. Butler, a New Orleans native and 1980 Yale graduate, died in February 2011. Though her educational background was in political science and management, Butler published a book of poems in 1989 and became a certified yoga and physical fitness trainer. She commuted to work in New York from Connecticut and eventually purchased the “house of her dreams,” according to her obituary, at 13 Lake Place.
Frogs decorate the tiles along one of the refinished fireplaces.
Then, at a Yale housing fair this February, Horsford bumped into the young men who will call 13 Lake Place home starting in May. They guys had been looking, mostly on Craigslist, for a house to rent together. They had hoped for a place that was comparable to housing costs on campus and in close proximity to their classes and the gym.
Yale heavyweight crew team member and junior Kamil Sadik (pictured) said having a house off campus where team members can live and socialize is an important part of the team experience.
On a practical level, sophomore and lightweight crew team member Alex George (pictured) said, juniors are often the odd group out because they’re not guaranteed housing in their colleges.
“Juniors really do have it worst in terms of housing,” said fellow sophomore Robin Molen-Grigull (pictured), who is on the heavyweight crew team member. “Freshmen and seniors really have priority.”
Sadik said living off campus also relieves the tension of having to share a room. It doesn’t hurt that they can forgo the university’s meal plan in favor of cooking their own food. In addition to each man having his own private room, each apartment has a full kitchen and washer and dryer. The men will live on the same block as Payne-Whitney, which is a priority when you have early morning workouts.
“This is the best of what we looked at, really,” Molen-Grigull said. “What they’re doing turned out pretty well.”
Horsford said renting to the members of the crew team was attractive because it doesn’t have the reputation for rowdiness that football teams have: “They train very hard and have a long, sober season.”
“My husband and I liked that, and it seemed to confirm the idea that the house would be respected and not ‘partied in’ too hard,” Horsford said. “Robin and the guys really convinced us that they were serious about academics first, then athletics, then their social lives.”
“They were very well-mannered and seem like gentlemen,” she said.
