5 Feet Ease The Way For Dixwell Development

A local pizza maker is a step closer to moving along with his plans to become a Dixwell Avenue developer now that a key city committee has advanced a plan to give him a five-foot easement from the city.

On Thursday afternoon, the city’s Property Acquisition and Disposition (PAD) Committee unanimously voted to grant Kadir Catalbasoglu the permanent five-foot easement onto 55 Dixwell Ave for $1.

The easement will allow Catalbasoglu, the owner of Brick Oven Pizza, to pull the necessary building permits to finish a seven-unit apartment complex at the former Keyes funeral home at 59 Dixwell Ave. His project has been held up for years because of a legal dispute between the city and a neighboring landlord.

“It will make Dixwell that much better,” Catalbasoglu said about the apartments. Now that he has the easement, he said, he anticipates completing construction at 59 Dixwell within the next eight months.

The local pizza maker and his wife Fatma purchased 59 Dixwell back in 2015. They received permission from the city in 2016 to convert the vacant funeral home into a four-story, seven-unit apartment complex consisting of six three-bedroom units and one four-bedroom unit, all targeted towards student rentals.

For the past two-plus years, Catalbasoglu has been unable to complete construction of the project because of a lawsuit that the owner of 51 Dixwell Ave. has filed against the city.

The lawsuit, filed by 51 Dixwell LLC’s Yehoshua Rosenstein in mid-2017, argues that Rosenstein, not the city, is the rightful owner of a driveway and dilapidated garage that sit next door at 55 Dixwell Ave. That largely vacant 3,000 square-foot parcel, which the city picked up in a foreclosure sale in 2015, sits right in between the former Reaves barber shop at 51 Dixwell and Catalbasoglu’s new development at 59 Dixwell.

“They’re claiming they have an easement on that,” Livable City Initiative (LCI) Property Acquisition and Disposition Coordinator Evan Trachten said about Rosenstein’s claim to 55 Dixwell. ​“There’s no recorded easement. This has been tied up in court.”

This legal dispute between Rosenstein and the city has impeded Catalbasoglu’s apartment construction because the old Keyes funeral home is a zero lot line building, meaning that the building runs all the way up against 59 Dixwell’s western boundary with 55 Dixwell. Catalbasoglu could not pull building permits to add new windows to that side of his apartment building because, if 55 Dixwell were ever to be developed, the windows of 59 Dixwell would be too close to any prospective building on the latter property.

Trachten said that Catalbasoglu got permission from the Board of Alders in 2017 to buy the lot at 55 Dixwell. But, as long as Rosenstein’s lawsuit against the city over 55 Dixwell remains in court, the city can’t sell the lot to the pizza maker.

So the city came up with a workaround: by granting Catalbasoglu the permanent five-foot easement onto the eastern end of 55 Dixwell, it enables Catalbasoglu to legally pull the necessary building permits from the city’s Building Department in order to add the new western windows to the apartments at 59 Dixwell.

“This will allow him to complete the construction of the Keyes funeral home,” Trachten said on Thursday.

He said the easement will go away once the city resolves its lawsuit with Rosenstein and Catalbasoglu purchases the lot at 55 Dixwell.

“This is a nonconforming lot,” city Deputy Director of Zoning Jenna Montesano said about 55 Dixwell. ​“So we’d want to sell it to one of the abutters anyway.”

The easement now goes to the City Plan Commission, and then to the LCI Board of Directors, and then to the full Board of Alders for a final approval.