Condo Plan Poised To Advance; Graffiti Targeted

Anna Festa is distressed by the extent of graffiti defacing a long-delayed construction site in Goatville and other locations in the area, including a ​“first,” graffiti on stop signs. So she’s considering asking the new mayor to restart a citywide (anti-)graffiti initiative to deal with the problem that doesn’t go away.

Festa, an East Rock/Cedar Hill alder, made those comments at Monday night’s regular meeting of the East Rock Community Management Team.

Due to overbooking problems for the community room at its usual spot at the mActivity gym on Nicoll Street, the 30 or so neighbors present trooped across the adjacent parking lot to the offices of New Haven Reads for the meeting.

There they discussed graffiti, traffic-calming, and crime, surrounded by like Hidden Figures and Carmela Full of Wishes and beneath inflated whales dangling from the ceiling.

In her report, Festa — who was in attendance along with fellow neighborhood Alders Abby Roth, Charles Decker, and Steve Winter — called particular attention to outbreaks of graffiti on the building, fences, and signposts near the delayed condo project at the former Lehman Brothers engraving plant at the corner of Foster Street and Canner.

Plans by owners Ocean Management for the rehabilitation of the site and the building of 30 condos, including six townhouses, were approved back in June of 2018. Since then neighbors have huge piles of dirt, various kinds of fences, and, oddly, someone dropping copious amounts of white bread, presumably for the birds near the site. No sign yet of actual condos.

To those irritations, Festa added the outbreaks of graffiti marring what the developer’s efforts the site’s temporary appearance less of an eyesore.

“There’s lots of graffiti,” she reported, ​“even on stop signs.”

Festa said maybe the time has arrived to re-form a defunct city government anti-graffiti initiative.

“We’ve done a lot of clean up in places like Cedar Hill, [but] it continues. We’ll have to have a conversation with the mayor because it costs” taxpayers to remove the graffiti, she added.

Other neighborhoods share similar concerns. At last week’s last week’s Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hill Management team, Livable City Initiative (LCI) specialist Maggie Fernandez bemoaned the absence of resources to deal with graffiti in her sprawling bailiwick, including the increasing nuisance of sales and advertising signs illegally stapled to posts and tree belts.

“We no longer have a contractor for graffiti removal, ” she said. ​“I have a small volunteer group, so be patient.”

East Rock LCI specialist Linda Davis brought Ocean Management’s agent, Melissa Saint, to Monday night’s East Rock CMT meeting to discuss the Lehman site. She attributed construction delays to needing to quantify the amount of contaminated soil and asbestos to be removed; finding the appropriate repositories for the stuff; and completing all the pertinent paperwork with the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

This past Friday, the state approved the plan, she reported. She said that that in the next ten days to two weeks, the piles of contaminated dirt, which peek out above the fencing, will be removed. She said construction should start in April or May, with a completion a year to 14 months later.

As to the graffiti, Saint said it had been noticed, on structures both outside and on the still standing cement walls. She reported the whole building has been boarded up in an effort to make the site, even in its temporary state, ​“pretty.”

She’d welcome help on the graffiti, she said, and also help on who’s putting bread out early every morning at the site, she said.

LCI Deputy Director for Neighborhood and Property Services Frank D’Amore stands ready to offer that help.

Reached following the meeting, D’Amore said LCI previously ran a program that offered ​“one time” free graffiti removal to owners of commercial buildings. LCI discontinued the $30,000 annual program after two years when it concluded it had the problem under control; it now sends out crews occasional to address minor graffiti complaints.

“However, we’ve noticed recently graffiti is surfacing and becoming very noticeable again and we’ve been receiving quite a few complaints,” D’Amore said. ​“So, come early spring we plan on bringing on a vendor again to battle the problem. The program will be similar to what has been done in the past.” He hopes to use money the court has promised the city from restitution paid by a tagger caught defacing property in town.