Melissa Bailey Photo
Fifty years ago an ambitious city plan helped a family buy and renovate a dream house in Wooster Square. Fifty years later, another aggressive city plan aims to take the family’s house away.
The story involves a row house at 12 Court St., the site of a 1960s renewal experiment that gave working families the chance to own and fix up older homes rather than have them succumb to the wreckling ball.
After living there most of her life, Nancy Twohill-Dixon died at the end of last year. The deed passed on to her husband.
Nearly 50 years after his wife’s family bought the home from the city, James Dixon now finds himself hustling to avoid losing it to the city’s aggressive tax-collection program.
Seeking to collect nearly $8,000 in back taxes, the city moved to take the home in January, a couple weeks after Dixon’s wife’s death. Now Dixon is working to avert the foreclosure auction, which is set for May 22 at noon.
The Court Street brownstone was one of 99 homes on which the city quietly initiated foreclosure in the past year, flouting a new city law that required it to notify nearby aldermen before moving to take people’s homes.
After it came out that the tax collector had ignored the law for a year, the city imposed a 30-day moratorium on city foreclosure actions on April 20.
Wooster Square Alderman Mike Smart (pictured) said the case is a prime example of a homeowner who could have been helped by the city’s tax abatement program, but fell through the cracks. City Hall spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city is reviewing the case and has no comment yet.
As Dixon works out a deal to sell the home, Smart vowed to press City Hall to back down.
“I’m going to do everything I can to stop this,” Smart said this week, as pedestrians strolled through sunny Court Street.
As he spoke, Dixon stopped by to feed his cats. He said he moved out after his wife died.
His departure will mark the final chapter in four decades of family history on the block.
New Beginning
Nancy Twohill’s parents, Edward and Margaret Flynn Twohill, bought the house in the early 1960s from the City of New Haven. The Twohills were one of 15 families who moved onto Court Street at the time through a New Haven Redevelopment Agency experiment.
The street, lined with 1870s row houses, was heavily used by people walking between Wooster Square and downtown. By 1960, the strip became known as “skid row,” according to according to one account by Mary Hommann, the Wooster Square project director for the Redevelopment Agency. The three-story brick homes were being used as rooming houses for men who worked on the railroad. About 150 roomers would sleep there, and pedestrians walking through would encounter “dank air” and “groups of men collected on stoops, holding their pint bottles of muscatel.”
The houses themselves “had become very rundown,” recalled Bill Donohue, a former director of the city’s Redevelopment Agency. “They were not being kept up at all. It was the one block, right on the green, that could have easily slipped into a slum if there wasn’t an intervention there.”
The Redevelopment Agency saw a chance to remove the blight and “raise the spirits” of the neighborhood, Hommann wrote.
The intervention marked a new model for redevelopment that did not involve a wrecking ball.
It came at a time when other parts of New Haven became ground zero for a wave of federally funded urban renewal developments, where slums were bulldozed to make way for new apartments and stores. After Mayor Dick Lee plunged forward with urban renewal in 1954, the city’s renewal efforts would put New Haven on the national map as America’s “Model City.”
When the first urban renewal money rolled in under the Housing Act of 1949, it could be spent only on slum clearance. “You couldn’t spend a nickel on renovation,” recalled Donohue. By 1960, the feds expanded the scope of urban renewal and offered cities money to fix up slum housing without tearing it down.
New Haven was one of the first cities nationwide to try this new type of renewal project.
Using federal money, the city bought and rehabilitated most of the houses on that block of Court Street. In January 1960, the city sent letters to property owners on Court and Olive Streets. It advised them to convert rooming houses into rentals — or the Redevelopment Agency would acquire the buildings and do so itself. Four of the 19 rooming house owners chose to undertake the conversion on their own; the agency bought the rest by mid-1962 and started fixing them up. It steam-cleaned and painted the original brick facades, put in new plumbing and electricity, and installed flower boxes in the windows. It got rid of on-street parking and expanded the sidewalks.
The rehabbed buildings were resold as two-family homes. By 1964, they were filled with new families. The new homeowners would live in the top two floors of the house, and rent out the bottom two floors.
Edward Twohill, an Irish-American motorcycle cop, bought 12 Court St. There, he and his wife raised a daughter, Nancy, and two sons, Billy and Eddy.
The block became abuzz with young families, recalled Beverly Carbonella, who lived briefly on Court Street and then in the former Italian Embassy building on the corner of Court and Academy.
“There were so many children on the street,” she recalled. At the time her daughter was born on Court Street, there were 15 to 16 children on the same block, she said. “Everyone knew one another. We would all meet on the street every day and help babysit one another’s kids.”
The new experiment transformed Court Street at a time when “the whole of Wooster Square was considered to be a slum,” Carbonella said. “It was a very close-knit neighborhood. It was wonderful. I remain friends with the families who lived there,” she said.
Over the years, national observers would hold Court Street as a new kind of model for breathing new life into a blighted city block.
Twohill Tradition
Nancy Twohill would live there for the next four decades. She outlived her parents and her two brothers, who both died at an early age. The house passed through a family trust. It ended up in the name of Nancy Twohill-Dixon and her husband, James Dixon.
Over the years, as Wooster Square transformed into a stable middle-class neighborhood and home values shot through the roof, Twohill-Dixon and her husband would struggle to pay their taxes. In December 2008, faced with a city foreclosure action, they applied for a tax abatement program that gives relief to low-income homeowners. They qualified for the program, but withdrew the application when a familial angel stepped in and paid the tax bill.
On Dec. 28, 2009, Nancy Twohill-Dixon died of liver cancer at age 47. With no children, nieces or nephews, she was the last of the Twohill line. The deed passed to her husband’s name.
A few weeks later, the city again foreclosed on the home to recoup a tax bill of $7,972.14. Dixon never entered an appearance in court. In his absence, the city moved forward with foreclosure, and the bill grew. The bill gained $715 in interest. The city-hired lawyer, Edward Jacobs of Jacobs & Rozich, charged $1,750 in attorney’s fees for nine hours of work. With the marshal fees, the total debt to the city grew to over $11,000.
A foreclosure date was set for May 22 at noon, and a big white foreclosure sign went up outside the home. The sign quickly created buzz among prospective home buyers; ears perked up at the chance for a discounted home on one of the city’s most coveted streets.
Today, the street retains its close-knit nature. Neighbors cook soup for each other every Sunday during the winter months. The block has no parking spots and, most of the time, no traffic. The corridor of carefully tended English gardens, with blooming trees above, draws a steady stream of admirers on lunch breaks.
Homes on that block have recently sold for over half a million dollars, neighbors said.
David Baker, the private attorney assigned by court to sell the property, said 12 Court is in good shape, one of the nicest he’s dealt with in his eight years selling homes through foreclosure. The home is divided into two apartments: A tenant lived on the first two floors, and the Twohill-Dixons lived above.
“Usually if I get properties, they’re dumps and they’re hovels,” he said. “Not so here. If you want to live near downtown New Haven, there’s pretty much no better place to live.”
Baker put up an ad calling attention to the prime location in historic Wooster Square. He said he got flooded with calls from prospective buyers.
“I have never spent so much time on the phone with interested people,” he said. The home was appraised at $350,000, but neighbors reckoned it could easily be sold for more.
As of Friday morning, the foreclosure sale was still set for May 22. The bold-lettered foreclosure sign still sat outside the home. Baker said Dixon has retained a lawyer and has worked out a deal to sell the home that would clear him of debt.
“It looks like this one is not going to sale,” he said, but the sale still needs to be entered into court and approved by a judge.
Dixon stopped by the house Friday afternoon holding three cans of kitty food. He said he comes by once a week to collect a few things and feed his pets. He said he doesn’t like to be in the home anymore after his wife died.
“It’s too big in there,” he said.
He ran into Alderman Smart, who handed him a card and offered to help him. Smart said he plans to urge the city tax collector to avert the scheduled foreclosure.
“The man lost his wife — that’s bad enough,” Smart said. “I really want to stop this.”
If I understood it correctly, the house (located on a very nice street) is owned without a mortgage and the only financial responsibilities are the taxes and ins? The owner in question is likely to be in their 40s or 50s?
The city should have followed the 30-day rule, but I don't think there's any evidence that 30 more days would have changed the situation.
What's up with feeding his cats only once a week, by the way? I understand grief, but there's no need to be cruel to the pets who depend on you.