Anne-Marie and Bill Foltz failed to convince their neighbors to make the St. Ronan-Edgehill neighborhood the city’s fourth local historic district.
“I just hope all of you will be out in the forefront of attempts to fight bad development in the future,” Anne-Marie Foltz said to her neighbors who prevailed.
By a mail-in secret ballot vote of 124 to 62, tallied early Tuesday evening in the office of the city clerk, a nearly three-year effort came to an end. Foltz, Karen Orzack-Moore and a group that fashioned itself as a subcommittee of the city’s Historic District Commission were not successful in convincing their neighbors that they need the protections of a local historic district.
Each eligible property along the architecturally eclectic spine of Prospect Street had a single vote only. So, for example, a house owned equally by a husband and wife had one vote, with the husband having half a vote and the wife the same. The Foltzes, who live in a condominium with 14 units, had a 1/14 vote, or each member of the couple 1/28th.
By halfway through the dramatic and occasionally contested count, which was conducted by Sally Brown, who runs the clerk’s office day to day, it was clear that campaigners for a historic district did not have the two-thirds majority, or 128 votes, required by state law, to prevail. An attempt to make the area an historic district also failed in 1989.
Click here and here for previous stories and debates from the organizing efforts.
June Sachs (pictured in the middle with like-minded opposers Dorothy Hunt, on the left, and Cindy Leffell) said she’d been living in the neighborhood for 30 years and that it has only improved. “People take care of their property in the way they see fit. I’ve never felt any threat in development,” she said, “and all a historic district designation would do would give us a new level of aesthetic bureaucracy to deal with.”
At issue was whether a local historic district, which would require permissions from the Historic District Commission for certain kinds of property improvements visible from the public way, was a plus or a minus. Supporters felt it would provide a layer of protection against McMansions arriving. Opponents felt their property rights were being infringed by an aesthetic bureaucracy for no discernable benefit.
Peter Dobkin Hall, also a member of the committee that had organized for the creation of a historic district, suggested that his disappointment was not only that he had lost a second time — he helped organize the 1989 effort — but that this time, the feelings generated in the community were so uncivil. “This year’s campaign,” he said, “did not practice restraint of pen and tongue.” He noted more than a dozen lawn signs against the district, which were not in evidence 20 years ago. Opinion also flew furiously, he said via the Internet. “Email allowed people to say electronically what they wouldn’t ever do face to face.”
Both camps, as they left the clerk’s office to go home, exchanged complimentary words and expressed mutual regard for their neighborhood and a commitment to protect it in the way each saw most fit. Still, hard feelings were close to the surface. “I just hope,” said Holtz, “that those of you who opposed this will come out and fight to keep bad development out. You haven’t so far.”
“That’s uncalled for,” said Sachs, “and factually wrong.”
And so it went. Organizers were of different minds as to why they did not succeed. They said they could not point to anything they did wrong. “It’s simply,” said Denise Acampora, “that people don’t want to relinquish their perceived rights. Its just part of the zeitgeist.”
Foltz, seeming a touch disconsolate, said she had no plans to mount another such effort any time soon.
The city’s current historic districts are Wooster Square, Quinnipiac River, and, most recently, City Point.