Maya McFadden Photos
335 St. John St., the morning after.
Benedict Aarestrup, with Selma, after vacating next-door apartment.
Crews are trying to save a multi-family house after a portion of it collapsed overnight.
A passer-by alerted the fire department that the facade on the side of the brick three-unit, two-and-a-half story house at 335 St. John St. was collapsing.
Emergency crews spent the night trying to prevent further damage. They remain on scene Thursday morning, and the street is blocked off.
“Nobody got hurt, thank God,” said Building Official Jim Turcio, who was on site overnight.
Now the city and the owner, Avi Meer, are hoping to save the rest of the building.
The building has been vacant for more than a year. One night tenants heard a vehicle crash into the building, causing structural damage, according to Meer. (Tenants who subsequently commented for this story denied that a vehicle had crashed into the building.) The city ordered the property vacated and a remediation plan put into place to avoid a collapse.
Not long after midnight, a firefighter banged on the door of Benedict Aarestrup, who lives in an apartment in a separate building attached to 335 St. John St.
“You got to come out,” he told her.
Aarestrup has been renting the apartment for May through AirBnB with her two kids and her therapy dog Selma while she waits for a lease to begin in June at another apartment in town. For now they have received temporary shelter from a friend who lives around the corner from St. John. She said a firefighter went back inside her St. John St. rental to retrieve a handful of her belongings.
The incident left her daughter who is in high school pretty shook up, she said. “I’m going to have to spend some time with her because we were already going through a huge transition, and now this.”
LCI Deputy Director Rafael Ramos said that the city relocated two individuals in total from the adjacent 341 St. John St. out of an abundance of caution. One has been put up at the La Quinta Inn on Long Wharf. The other found temporary shelter with a nearby friend.
Martina Myskohlid: Not surprised.
Yale student Martina Myskohlid, 24 ‚was staying at her boyfriend’s house at the time directly across the street. She was woken up by the loud bang of the collapsing building around 2 a.m, she said.
She said she “expected this to happen” because of the obvious condition of the building. “It didn’t look stable or even fixable.”
Neighbors had feared for months that the building would collapse. They raised those fears at a community management team meeting last year, at which a Livable City Initiative representative reported that Meer was working cooperatively with the city.
On May 22, 2020, Turcio issued an unsafe structure notice to Meer. He issued a second, final notice on Sept. 9 ordering them to maintain the property in a “secured condition” while obtaining permits to remediate the unsafe conditions.
The scene Thursday morning.
Meer said he hired a structural engineer to put together a plan to restore the building. But the insurance company refused to pay, challenging the owner’s version of the cause of the damage. Meer said the driver who slammed into the building has never been located or identified.
“We are in a legal dispute with the insurance company,” Meer said from the scene Thursday morning. “This insurance company is pushing the blame elsewhere,. If insurance won’t cover us when a building partially collapses, what is insurance for?”
Until the dispute is resolved, he doesn’t have money to repair the building.
The building is attached to another residence, so demolition could be tricky.
“We’re going to try to save the building,” Turcio said. “It’s iffy.”
Turcio said his office had issued repair orders before the collapse, and was monitoring the situation. He knew that Meer’s engineer had drawn up the plans, and that the insurance dispute was tying up progress.
The house was built in 1852, according to city land records. Meer, who lives in New Haven, bought the property in 2018 through a limited liability corporation for $414,000. He said it had been fully rented until he had to clear out the tenants following last year’s crash.
Isn't it awful that the insurance company doesn't cover collapse of a building and is dragging their feet in paying when the landlord and the neighborhood knows the building was hit by a vehicle? I feel terrible for the landlord who wants to fix things but can't get the money from the insurance, and I feel even worse for the tenants and the neighbors who all saw this collapse was imminent. This isn't the first time an insurance company dragged their feet and denied a claim after a legitimate issue. We pay them lots of money and then they don't pay when we need them, because it's all about the profits.