St. Michael’s School Conversion Resurrected

After a false start with a controversial landlord, St. Michael’s Church has found a new developer to purchase its vacant former school and convent buildings and turn them into apartments.

At this week’s meeting of the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) in the basement meeting room of 200 Orange St., zoning commissioners voted unanimously to approve the church’s special exception request to permit 11 parking spaces where 61 spaces are required at the church’s 29 Wooster Pl. location in Wooster Square.

The church has been trying for a while to obtain zoning changes and to sell the property to an apartment developer. A previous attempt to sell to a company affiliated with Mandy Management fell through. But now a new deal is in the works.

The zoning change approved at Tuesday night’s zoning meeting will allow the church to cede 15 of its current on-site parking spaces to two former school buildings and one former convent building located at 234, 240, and 250 Greene St. to make those long vacant properties more enticing for future developers.

East Rock Alder Anna Festa, who is a parishioner and a trustee at the church, said the zoning approval came as quite the relief, particularly because the church is already under contract to sell the three derelict Wooster Square buildings to a new developer, RG Realty Associates LLC.

The Branford-based holding company is owned by Lisa Amato.

“Those buildings are on the tax rolls,” Festa said. In fact, the church had just paid its property taxes on them last week. She said this new deal will hopefully put these buildings to a much more productive use than their current state of empty disrepair.

“Since the contract was just signed,” Festa told the Independent on Wednesday, ​“we are going to wait for all the documents to be finalized, and also wait for a plan from the developer before deciding on a community meeting. It would be best for the developer to show and explain his plan once it is complete.”

Local realtor Lou Proto confirmed that the church is under contract with Amato to sell the Greene Street buildings, which Proto’s realty group had listed for sale at $1.5 million.

Proto said that the sale should close sometime within the next 75 days.

He said that Amato plans to convert the three vacant buildings in 23 apartments, and that she plans to host a community meeting on the prroposed development. Late last year, neighbors succeeded in quashing a prior 23-apartment development deal that the church had with signed with an affiliate of Mandy Management.

Amato did not respond to requests for comment by the publication time of this article.

Reached by phone on Wednesday afternoon, St. Michael’s Father Robert Roy said the imminent sale of the three buildings to Amato will be a great boon for a church that has been burdened for the entirety of his year-long tenure by the taxable derelict properties.

“We can’t just afford to keep these buildings,” he said. ​“They’re killing us.”

Roy said that the vacant buildings are an eyesore in the picturesque Wooster Square community. He said thieves routinely strip materials from the vacant buildings. He added that he, too, was once robbed while outside the former school site.

“It’s a good thing,” he said about the new deal with Amato. ​“I think it will be a good thing for the neighborhood.”