Building Boom Collides With History, Kids

A seven-story apartment building planned for a downtown parking lot won a key approval — after developers agreed to move an adjacent 200-year-old house several dozen feet up the road.

That pleased preservationists, but not a childcare center director who envisioned a wall of shadow over her site’s playground.

That complex and contentious debate played out over a nearly three-hour public hearing during the City Plan Commission’s December meeting on the ground floor of 200 Orange St. The entire meeting itself stretched for nearly six hours.

The commissioners ultimately voted 4 – 1 in support of the site plan for 269, 275, and 283 Orange St. Commission Vice-Chair Leslie Radcliffe cast the sole dissenting vote.

The project’s White Plains, N.Y.-based developer, Gerald Seligsohn of the holding company 59 Elm Street Partners LLC, plans to build a seven-story, 102-unit market-rate apartment building atop the site’s existing surface lot.

The development will include 57 studios, 39 one-bedroom apartments, six two-bedroom apartments, 4,200 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, and 44 parking spaces, to be located at the rear of the property.

Local attorney Jim Segaloff and Joseph Schiffer of Newman Architects told the commissioners at the meeting this past Wednesday night that the developer is committed to bringing in a restaurant to fill that commercial space. The new construction will include air shafts in that very space, Schiffer said, to ensure that the prospective tenant is a restaurant.

“Orange Street is changing,” Schiffer said. ​“It’s being built out. We’re excited about taking all of that open gap and filling it with frontage.”

“The idea is to renew the street,” he continued. ​“To get life on the street.”

Hiccup #1: The Pinto House

The Orange Street parcels are not entirely surface parking lots, however.

The one building currently standing on the 0.74-acre site is the Pinto-Whitney House, which was built circa 1810 and has ties to some of the earliest Jewish settlers to New Haven.

New Haven Preservation Trust board member Susan Godshall explained that the house is one of only 30-odd New Haven properties individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Click here to read that entry, which was approved by the National Park Service in 1985.

“Individually listed properties are special,” said Godshall, who is also a member of the city’s Historic District Commission. They get intensively researched at both the state and federal levels, she added. Most New Haven historic properties are recognized within larger national historic districts. But the Pinto house, because of its occupants and place in local Jewish history, is of unique historic value.

Godshall described the developers of the planned seven-story apartment building as ​“cooperative, forthright, and sincere.”

She said the local historic preservation organization is happy to endorse this development project since the developers have promised to pick up and move the Pinto house roughly 40 feet to the north.

However, she said Wednesday, that endorsement comes with a catch. The preservation trust will only support the project if the relocated building can maintain its status on the National Register.

While that short of a move likely won’t disqualify the property’s official historic status just by virtue of distance, she said. However, the developer plans to move the Pinto House to within five feet of the site’s property line.

And, per city building code, any structures within 10 feet of the property line have to be fireproofed. The installation of fireproof cladding or an exterior sprinkler system will likely result in the building being bumped off of the National Register.

If that happens, she said, the trust would no longer support the project.

Hiccup #2: The CT Children’s Building

The historic house, which is currently empty of any tenants, wasn’t the only hurdle encountered by the project’s developers.

There was also the matter of how this development will affect the CT Children’s Building childcare center, right next door at the corner of Wall Street and Orange Street.

CT Children’s Building Director Sandy Malmquist and her husband, Paul Wessel, pleaded with the commissioners to table the project so that they could have more time to negotiate with the developers and the city.

The planned relocation of the Pinto House will place that two-and-a-half story structure within six feet of the childcare center’s outdoor playground, Malmquist said.

That will cast a long shadow over the children’s play space, she said, and will create an alley between the playground, the historic building, and the street. (Click here to read Malmquist’s full testimony.)

“We can do much better in-fill development than this oversize, pro-forma box with windows,” Wessel said about the planned seven-story apartment building, to be located roughly 60 feet from the children’s playground.

“There are an extraordinary number of beautiful three- and four- and five-story buildings on this street,” he said about both sides of the Orange Street block. The new apartment building will be leaning more towards the scale of the Frontier building than anything else in the immediate area, he said.

New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell agreed. ​“Across the whole lower block, there’s nothing above four stories,” Farwell said. She described Schiffer’s earlier presentation of that stretch of Orange Street as being defined by Frontier and the five-story 59 Elm St. office building across the street as a ​“distortion of the context.”

Dwight resident and social worker Pat Wallace also spoke up in opposition to the development as currently conceived and to the impact it might have on the children’s center.

“The importance of having what Sandy does in that building can’t be overstated,” she said. During this citywide construction boom, she said, city planners have to make sure that the ​“good infusion of development doesn’t tear apart the fabric of neighborhoods.”

Wessel alsoc riticized the historic commission for ​“cutting their private deal with the developer rather than to engage the rest of the community.”

“This Is A Slam Dunk!

Segaloff, who said he grew up across the street from Wessel and has known and respected him for years, dismissed all criticism of the project as inappropriate for the City Plan Commission to consider.

This is an as-of-right development, he said. ​“This is a slam dunk! What are we doing here?”

The project will replace surface parking with housing and commercial space, he said. It’s in compliance with the city’s zoning codes. The developers are paying to move and preserve the historic Pinto House. And the kids at the children’s center will no longer have to look at dozens of cars driving into and out of the adjacent lot all day long.

“We should have this approval,” he said.

The majority of the commissioners ultimately agreed with Segaloff, though they did impose a number of conditions on their approval.

They said that the developers have to do everything ​“commercially reasonable” to ensure that the relocated Pinto House stays on the National Register of Historic Places.

They gave the developer permission to reduce the project’s planned 24-foot-driveway by six feet without having to come back before the commission for approval. City Engineer Giovanni Zinn came up with that idea.

If the city and developer traffic engineers agree that the driveway can be narrowed and still allow for the safe turning of trash pick-up vehicles, then perhaps the Pinto House won’t have to move as many feet north, potentially saving it from having to have any fireproofing and preserving some sunlight for the nextdoor playground.

The third and final condition reinforced the City Plan department’s standard requirement that developers work closely and cautiously with the city Building Department to ensure that the construction zone does not disturb the site’s neighbors with dust and noise and safety hazards. Especially since, in this case, the neighbors are pre-school kids.

“I am still hopeful that the city will put its quarter block parcel out to bid early in the new year and change the dynamics and economics of what can be done on the block,” Paul Wessel said afterwards. ​“In the meantime, we look forward to working with our new neighbors to the betterment of all as New Haven continues to grow and prosper.