City Digitizing Centuries Of Construction History

Building Official Jim Turcio knew his grandfather built houses in New Haven. He just didn’t know where.

Thanks to a massive new scanning effort that will see over one million pages of city building permits moved online, Turcio can now point to a handful of 70-year-old East Shore ranch houses that were built by his dad’s dad.

When the digitization project is through, anyone with an internet connection will be able to do the same.

That’s thanks to the city Building Department’s plans to digitize 1.4 million pages of building permits dating back to the early 19th century.

For the past two weeks, Turcio and 16 staff and interns from his departmenthave been siftng through the dozens of filing cabinets that line the department’s fifth floor offices at 200 Orange St.

Working alongside city employees and interns from a variety of city departments, they’ve been sorting and alphabetizing over two centuries of building permits by street name, and then putting them in plastic crates and paper boxes in hallways, conference rooms, and offices.

Starting Feb. 25, Xerox will be working with the department to scan 1.4 million pages of permits over the course of 94 days.

Those permits will be uploaded to the digital content management system DocuShare, where the image scans will be rendered text-searchable.

They will then by transferred to View Permit, where all city building permits pulled since 2000 are currently stored.

And they will then make their way over to Municity, a cloud-based software service that the city recently announced it will contract with to centralize public records and make those records accessible in an online, public-facing database.

The scanning project is part of a department-wide initiative to reduce its use of paper by up to 70 percent, Turcio said.

It’s also part of a larger city-wide initiative to make records and services from a variety of departments more accessible, transparent, streamlined, and available online. City Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany said the building permit scanning project will cost $192,000 of capital funds.

Starting Feb. 25, for example, the department will only accept new paper permits on a limited basis, requiring builders instead to file their applications electronically through View Permit. Applicants can pay permit fees via credit card or PayPal, and can review their applications and track which departments have signed off on them in real time.

But for Turcio, an East Shore native who has spent the past 22 years working for the building department, the digitization project goes even beyond saving paper and streamlining government services. It also opens up for the public a whole dimension of New Haven’s history that, for the past two centuries, has been tucked away in city government filing cabinets, storage closets, and offices.

“This is history,” he said, picking up a handful of yellowing paper slips that describe everything from new construction to building modifications to electrical and plumbing installations in buildings throughout the city going back to the early 1800s.

Of the many permits that Turcio himself has come across during his weeks of sorting, alphabetizing, and preparing for digitization, one dates back o Dec. 29, 2013, when then Building Official J.E. Austin granted the U.S. Treasury Department a permit to build a $1.3 million courthouse and post office on Church Street by the Green.

The permit lists James Gamble Rogers as the architect, and the Chas. McCaul Company as masons. The walls of the new building, the permit states, were to be made of Pink Tennessee marble.

That building was finished in 1919, and is now the Richard C. Lee federal courthouse at 145 Church St.

Turcio also found a May 1958 permit pulled by the city, requesting to erect seven temporary tent units and two 250-seat at 152 Temple St.

The purpose of the tents and bleachers was to host the New Haven Festival of the Arts. That was nearly four decades before the International Festival of Arts & Ideas first started its annual downtown arts celebrations in 1996.

A bit closer to home, Turcio found a half-dozen building permits pulled by his grandfather, John Turcio, who died four years before Jim was born.

Turcio found permits with his grandfather’s name for houses on Townsend Avenue, Quinnipiac Avenue, Fort Hale Road, and elsewhere.

“I knew he built a lot of houses,” Turcio said. ​“I just didn’t know where.”

Turcio said he had just visited one of those Townsend Avenue homes a few weeks ago to inspect some noise remediation work that had been done because of the house’s proximity to Tweed Airport.

A few days later, he came across a permit showing that he had been standing in a house built by his grandfather.

“It brought you back,” he said about seeing the permit.

Turcio said that, once all of the paper permits are scanned and uploaded to the Municity database, the paper records will not be destroyed but will be stored somewhere offsite.

“This is the test project,” he said about other city departments with copious paper records following suit after the building department finishes its digitization of permits, ​“to make sure we get it right.”