Thomas Breen photos
189 Dwight. Below: Healy faces neighbors.
Scott Healy never wanted to be an absentee landlord. But nearly four years after a burst water pipe wreaked havoc on his historic Dwight Street home, the building’s still empty and uninhabitable, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of repairs still to go.
He’s determined to restore it, and keep it in the right hands.
Healy gave that update — and offered an apology — Tuesday night during the regular monthly meeting of the Dwight Community Management Team in the gymnasium of Amistad Middle School on Edgewood Avenue.
The house in question is 189 Dwight St. — a four-family, two-story Carpenter Gothic-style building on a residential block dotted with mid-19th and early-20th century homes.
Healy, who currently lives in West Haven, is a former co-chair of the management team and the former executive director of the Town Green Special Services District. He lived at 189 Dwight for nine years before moving to Chicago for graduate school in 2008.
He told the roughly 20 neighbors present Tuesday that he is still working on repairing and restoring the property after one of the pipes on the second floor burst in January 2016 and flooded the entire house, blowing out three of the building’s furnaces.
“I’m here really to apologize,” he said, “because I still consider myself a resident of Dwight Street.”
“Overnight,” he continued, “it went from being my house to being a property that requires bridge funding from a lender. I had to make the very difficult decision of bring in an equity investor because I have no interest in selling to Mandy or to Pike or to any of the other people who have offered me cash numerous times to just take the property off my hands. I have no interest in doing that.”
He the building is still unoccupied, stripped bare of all exterior siding, and has a tarp over its back roof because of his longstanding and expensive efforts to restore the property to its historic roots.
Healy showing off the diamond-pane windows in April 2018.
Last year, he hired local historian and architect Colin Caplan to research the history of the property and map out a plan for its historic rehabilitation. The house was likely built in 1853 by George Baldwin Woodruff, the London sales representative for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, he said. It was later sold to Oliver F. Winchester.
“So it has an important history to the neighborhood,” he said. “It’s also a very, very beautiful building that has not been taken care of over time.”
The houses’s interior spiral stairwell.
The house has retained many of its original interior and exterior architectural elements, he said, including the vertical board-and-batten siding, diamond-framed window panes, and spiral stairwell.
“So I’ve been doing the slow slog,” he said.
“We are on pause right now,” he added, because he has to do some more work on the interior to make one of the units up to code and habitable. Once that’s done, he plans on moving into the property, paying off his bridge loans, and overseeing the building’s continued rehab.
“It’s much more complicated than I had anticipated,” he said. “I do sincerely apologize. I do not want to be an absentee landlord.” He said he’s spent too much time in his life as the co-chair of the management team harassing landlords to maintain their properties for him to fall into that rut of being a problem landlord himself.
Comins: What’s the timeline?
“I don’t understand what the timeline is,” said Edgewood Avenue neighbor Jane Comins.
What comes next? And won’t the cold weather and snow this winter just further harm the building while its still in such disrepair?
“I can only say that every single layer that I’ve uncovered has brought new challenges,” Healy replied, “from foundation issues that I’m glad we discovered, to past termite damage that I hadn’t realized had occurred, to you name it.”
He has committed to and signed up a contractor, he said.
He said the anticipated exterior renovation work alone should cost around $200,000.
“We’ve about one-fifth into that right now,” he said.
The back of 189 Dwight, with a tarp-covered roof.
“Trust me, I want to move as quickly as possible.” Every day he can’t live at 189 Dwight, he said, he’s paying financing on a loan he can’t really afford.
Healy said the contractor should resume work on the property later this month. In the meantime, he plans to do exterior maintenance work himself.
“All the contracts are signed to get it done.”
“It’s a lovely and iconic property in the neighborhood,” Comins said. “Everyone’s concerned about the property and hope you succeed.”
Good timing for engaging with the community Scott. As long as you stay engaged, I'm sure you have everyone's support just like you have mine.
Matt Short