City Tackles Car-Tinkerer’s Mess

The city is taking a Quinnipiac Meadows homeowner to court for consistently failing to clean his yard of the heaps of used cars he likes to fix up and race.

The city, acting through its anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), placed a lien on the home of Kenneth Woodward, Jr. at 236 Cranston St. on Jan. 3 for Woodward’s alleged failure to pay $5,800 in fines related to turning his lawn into an unlicensed junkyard. LCI has been assessing the fines at $100 a day since Oct. 25, 2017.

Woodward is also facing criminal prosecution in housing court for his violation of city anti-blight and building safety laws. The cases are awaiting disposition in state Superior Court, but LCI representatives anticipate that, if Woodward does not clean up his yard and pay the fines, the judge may issue a bench warrant for his arrest.

Cranston Street is a quiet residential block near Quinnipiac Avenue and the North Haven border. The street is lined with modest single-family homes from the early and mid-1900s, their pitched roofs and vinyl siding a distant suburban cry from the stone, bricks, concrete and steel that make up the city’s Downtown.

On a recent rainy afternoon, most houses’ blinds were drawn, lawns lay flat and yellowing in the cold, and barely a car, let alone a pedestrian, was in sight.

Woodward’s house sits near the corner of Cranston Street and Portland Street. Woodward, 49, has owned the two-story home since 1995, and currently lives there with his mother.

According to neighbors, Quinnipiac Meadows Alder Gerald Antunes, and LCI Deputy Director Frank D’Amore, Woodward has been storing cars on his lawn and refusing to maintain his property by city code for many years.

In the past two years alone, the city has filed six notices based on three different inspections that have found multiple building code and zoning ordinance violations at 236 Cranston St.

Those violations pertain to storing unauthorized or accumulated junk on one’s property; the parking of inoperable vehicles without a junkyard license; the refusal to trim overgrown lawns and hedges that are in public view; and the refusal to keep yards and lots clear and free of physical hazards.

Separated from a neighbor’s clean-cut lawn by a white-picket fence, Woodward’s property is a mess of leaves, debris and gutted automobiles.

Six cars, piled amidst discarded tires and scrap metal, sit atop a thick brown carpet of leaves and twigs on the front lawn. A sky-blue Ford Ranger XLT pickup truck carries a rusted, windowless Ford Thunderbird with the numbers 73 decaled on the passenger side.

A low-lying blue sportscar that is missing a back axle and is propped up by a stray tire is filled with leaves and bright blue foam padding.

According to a neighbor and to Woodward’s mother, Lois Stone, Woodward likes to race cars.

Bell Cartegna, who lives around the corner on Portland Street, said that Woodward fixes up scrapped cars and turns them into bumper cars.

Cartegna said that Woodward takes them to some out-of-the-way obstacle course, then races them in circles and crashes them into the different obstacles. Cartegna did not know the location of the obstacle course.

Stone, who spoke to this street-bound reporter from her home’s second-floor balcony, said that her son likes to race cars. She said that he has not moved the cars from his lawn yet because he has heart problems.

“He’s having some friends come by and pick them up soon,” she said. She did not know when that removal would happen.

Woodward could not be reached for comment for this article; he did not respond to messages. Stone confirmed that her son lives at home with her, but he was not home during this reporters’ multiple visits. His phone number is out of service.

“Neighbors are really upset,” Alder Antunes told the Independent. He said that the police, the building department and LCI are trying everything they can to get this property cleaned, and that multiple neighbors have told him they worry about how 236 Cranston St. will depreciate the value of their own homes.

“We’ve exhausted all attempts at being the nice guy,” Antunes said. ​“Now it’s time to see what the courts can do.”

Besides Cartegna, no Cranston Street neighbors chose to comment on the record about their concerns with Woodward’s home.

“We’ll leave this up to the city to take care of,” one neighbor said after opening their door to talk with this reporter. ​“We still have to live here.”

“This is ongoing, egregious and upsetting to the neighbors and to the alder,” LCI’s Frank D’Amore said. He said that Woodward has not complied with any of the criminal ordinances and that he has not paid any of the outstanding fines related to his anti-blight ordinance violations.

“We’re going after him criminally and civilly,” he said, referring to the pending court cases, the lien, and LCI’s issuance of a civil citation on Oct. 4, 2017 that outlines Woodward’s many violations. 

D’Amore said that Woodward has to decide if he would truly rather go to jail and forfeit his home rather than clean up his property.

“Some people just don’t get it,” he said.