Preservation Awards Honor ​“Walk Into The Past”

When officials at the New Haven Preservation Trust told Chris Schaefer they wanted to recognize his work over the last 31 years in lovingly restoring his 1871 oysterwoman’s home on Second Street in City Point, his first response was, ​“But I’m not done yet.”

He told them he needed about six more years to finish up before being considered for an award. Their response: ​“We don’t want to give it posthumously.”

Schaefer recollected the conversation Tuesday afternoon just before he received an award for his work on his ​“Italianate pearl” at the New Haven Preservation Trust​‘s (NHPT) 2017 Awards ceremony.

A crowd of about 40 preservationists, officials, and admirers gathered on the second-floor foyer of City Hall as NHPT gave annual preservation laurels to individuals and organizations whose work focused on what the awards committee’s chair, Duo Dickinson, called ​“the most essential type of building there is” — the home.

Schaefer received his Merit Plaque for decades of history-conscious improvements, both inside and out.

When he repainted the original interiors, he left some spots unpainted, as in the case of one of two closet door frames, so future owners could see what was.

“To see this is to walk into the past,” said Dickinson.

Schaefer, a neighborhood activist who has also written a history of City Point, said in his notes to NHPT officials that when he came to the end of his ​“multi-year exterior painting,” which sought to approximate original colors, he bowed to other urges, using trim colors that he termed ​“over-the-top” for such a simple house.

It provides a little relief to the largely monochrome exterior colors of the neighborhood, he observed, and ​“it always makes people smile to walk past my house.”

Betsy and Len Grauer received NHPT’s House Preservation Award for their elegant restoration of a 1912 house on Bishop Street, originally built by Laura Sargent of Sargent Hardware. The citation called the house ​“casually majestic.” Dickinson said the manner in which the Grauers preserved the essence of the house and made it modern ​“did it proud.”

A third award, NHPT’s landmark plaque, was given to architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake of the architecture firm Kieran Timberlake for their 2011 renovations and additions to Eero Saarinen’s original 1962 Morse & Stiles residential colleges at Yale University.

Calling both the original — and the restoration work — ​“a poetic wonder,” Dickinson said the renovation added and enhanced functionality, while the outside of the now classic buildings’ exterior and their silhouette don’t seemed changed a jot.

Finally, the NHPTs most prestigious award, its Margaret Flint Award, which has not been given in a decade, went not for a single building but for an organization’s career as one of New Haven’s anchoring preservation-minded affordable housing groups in our town: Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven.

The award noted that NHS has in 37 years of work acquired and transformed blighted houses into affordable housing, with the tally up to 275 houses and rising.

Rather than bulldoze or wreck houses like the fleet of turn-of-the-century homes at the intersection of Whalley Avenue and Ella Grasso Boulevard, over the years NHS has found a way — often through clustering its work in carefully chosen areas as in Newhallville, so that the result is a group of historically preserved homes that helps the working families who move in and the neighborhood as a whole.

The group’s longtime director of design and construction, Henry Dynia, accepted the award on behalf of founder Jim Paley, who himself could not be at the ceremony for medical reasons.

“This is really an honor. Jim would be thrilled,” said Dynia. He recalled his own family’s New Haven roots going back to 1900; at one point, future Mayor Bart Guida was a tenant in a building Dynia’s family owned.

Schaefer, a neighborhood activist who has also written a history of City Point, said in his notes to NHPT officials that when he came to the end of his ​“multi-year exterior painting,” which sought to approximate original colors, he bowed to other urges, using trim colors that he termed ​“over-the-top” for such a simple house.

It provides a little relief to the largely monochrome exterior colors of the neighborhood, he observed, and ​“it always makes people smile to walk past my house.”

Dynia and his crew reported that Wednesday, they are cutting the ribbon — with a new homeowner — on their latest project. It’s a renovation of a 1950s ranch, an unusually ​“modern” house for them, on upper Sherman Avenue.