Thomas MacMillan Photo
The housing authority has worked for years towards demolishing a crumbling Howard Avenue apartment tower — arranging a land swap with Yale-New Haven Hospital, moving the tenants out, building a new tower nearby.
Then someone decided the bleak old Brutalist building is an “historic” treasure.
That someone was the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, which recently placed 904 – 912 Howard Ave. on the Historic Resources Inventory.
The new designation put a kink in plans to demolish the William T. Rowe building (pictured) at that address. And it raised the question of at what point awful architecture becomes its own icon — and therefore harder to remove.
With a vote of approval Wednesday night, the City Plan Commission unkinked the plans and paved the way for demolition.
The demolition is one of the final steps in a years-long process resulting in a new building for New Haven’s housing authority and a new piece of land for the hospital. Several years ago, the housing authority determined the nearly 40-year-old Rowe building was a lost cause—inefficient, cramped, essentially obsolete. The authority arranged a deal with Yale-New Haven to build a replacement tower nearby on a piece of land belonging to the hospital and move the tenants over there. In exchange, the authority would demolish Rowe and give that piece of land to the hospital.
Along the way, however, the Rowe building picked up special status as an historic edifice exemplifying the “Modernist-Brutalist-Post-Modern” style, according to its Historic Resources Inventory form.
“The use of the Bison precast panel system was innovative in 1975,” the inventory form states. “Like the use of split-ribbed or scored concrete masonry a few years earlier … designers were looking for ways to achieve the powerful and hard-edged and abstract monumentality that was in vogue, using materials other than cast-in-place concrete as at the Yale Art and Architecture Building or New Haven Fire Headquarters.”
The New Haven Code of Ordinances requires a 90-day delay and review prior to the demolition of “historic resources.” That requirement was the kink in the plans, disrupting the timeline that the housing authority had agreed to with the hospital.
If the building is not demolished by Dec. 31, 2013, the authority will have to pay the hospital $5.2 million, authority Deputy Director Jimmy Miller (pictured) told City Plan commissioners Wednesday night.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has assessed the building and declared it obsolete, Miller said. Its impending demise has been the subject of “extensive public hearings and processes,” he said.
City Plan Commission chair Ed Mattison (pictured) said he served on a board several years ago looking at the possibility of reusing the Rowe building.
“We couldn’t find a use,” he said. It was “financially insurmountable” to do anything with it.
The commissioners voted unanimously to approve the demolition of the building. That vote will save the authority about a month and a half, said City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg.