Hill Houses Slated For Demolition

Three boarded-up Hill houses owned by Renaissance Management’s Matthew Harp are slated to be demolished in January, in the latest round-up of city buildings on the chopping block.

The three houses at 43 Ward St., 47 Ward St., and 14 Vernon St. were on a six-building list that City Plan Department Director Aïcha Woods provided to the Historic District Commission during its regular December meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

Woods said that those properties’ landlords have recently pulled demolition permits for each building. A 90-day demolition notice and delay is triggered any time a landlord is looking to knock down a building that is listed as a contributing structure in a national historic registry, she continued.

She said she’s been seeing more and more of these notices recently as the investment and construction boom that continues to transform the city’s landscape also results in existing stock being torn down.

All of these buildings fall outside of the city’s three local historic districts, Woods said at last week’s meeting, and therefore the commission has no authority over stopping or slowing down demolition. Nevertheless, she wanted to bring the pending tear-downs to their attention — particularly considering that a preservation ordinance being pushed by local historic preservationists would beef up the commission’s powers in such instances, if that law were to be passed.

Woods pointed out that Renaissance’s Harp, who owns the three-family house at 47 Ward St., the two-family house at 43 Ward St., and the three-family house at 14 Vernon St. through various holding companies named after the buildings’ street addresses, has struggled with trespassers over the years. The buildings are just down the block from both John C. Daniels School and the APT Foundation methadone clinic.

The 90-day demolition noticing period for each of those three Hill buildings is up on Jan. 26, she said.

Historic District Commissioner Susan Godshall said she drove by the houses at 47 and 43 Ward recently. While 43 Ward in particular seems to be in pretty bad shape, she admitted, 47 Ward still has a fair amount of ​“lovely carpentry detail.”

The arched windows, brackets, and dentillation are all ​“really nice stuff that can be pulled off and sold,” she said. She said she hopes the landlord considers this before the buildings are torn down.

New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell said that she is trying to find some nonprofit developer to buy these three Hill buildings, fix them up, and convert them into affordable housing.

“We’re desperately in need of affordable housing,” she said. ​“They’re very good buildings for people to live in and walk to” Yale New Haven Hospital’s nearby campus.

Farwell warned that three soon-to-be-vacant Hill lots could be prime venues for YNHH institutional expansion and not more housing.

The same is true for the lot at 1471 Chapel St., she said, which was also on Woods’s list of 90-day demos.

This lot at the corner of Sherman Avenue and Chapel Street used to hold a four-family house that had been vacant for years because of a fire, Woods said.

The building’s owner, Menahem Edelkopf of the holding company 1471 – 1475 Chapel Street LLC, knocked down the building several weeks ago after completing the 90-day delay from when he first pulled a demolition permit. That parcel is now roughly a dozen surface parking spaces, she said.

It’s also directly across the street from where Yale New Haven Hospital plans to build a new $838 million neuroscience center and St. Raphael campus expansion.

Woods’s list also included the early-19th century, two-story academic building at 87 Trumbull St.

While the building’s owner, Yale University, pulled a demolition permit for that property on Oct. 29, she said, the university doesn’t actually plan on knocking it down. Instead, it’ll be picking up and moving it down the block to make way for a planned new economics department building.

Rounding off the list is the single-family row house at 42 Read St. in Newhallville. Woods said that that property’s landlord, Edward Lockery, plans to knock down that building on Dec. 16.

Demolition has been on the mind of historic preservationists a lot recently. Norwalk’s Spinnaker Real Estate Partners recently began tearing down the old Webster Bank building at 80 Elm St. to make way for a planned new Hilton Garden Inn hotel.

And preservationists have so far delayed the demolition of two vacant Howe Street buildings by the local development firm MOD Equities, which wants to build a new 30-unit apartment complex on those parcels.