Thomas Breen photo
That's some mighty fine "beton brut.”
A pair of six-story concrete “gigantic megaliths” on Fountain Street have traded hands for $28 million — leaving 150-plus Westville apartments under new ownership for the first time in two decades.
That’s according to recent filings on the city’s land records database.
A warranty deed posted on Nov. 19 states that Cue Fountain Property LP and Cue Fountain Property TIC 2 LLC have paid 200 Fountain Owner LLC a total of $28,650,000 to buy the properties at 200 Fountain St., 216 Fountain St., 226 Fountain St., 234 Fountain St., and 1259 Forest Rd.
Those five parcels contain a total of 158 apartments across a handful of buildings, with a vast majority of the rental units being located in two six-story buildings at 200 and 216 Fountain.
These properties last sold for $15.3 million in 2004, and they were most recently appraised by the city for tax purposes as worth a combined sum of $19.1 million.
The seller of these properties is affiliated with a New York City-based real estate company called Beachwold Residential — which, in 2022, spent $160 million buying the 500-unit downtown apartment tower at 360 State.
“Beachwold sold the asset because we had reached the end of our planned hold period of roughly 20 years,” the company’s president, Gideon Friedman, told the Independent, “but we remain extremely bullish on New Haven’s future and committed to the success of 360 State Street and our other properties in and around New Haven.”
The buyers of these Fountain Street apartment buildings are affiliated with the Lakewood, N.J.-based Cue Residential, a real estate company founded in 2018 by David Klein and Lawrence Koenig.
This isn’t the first time Beachwold has sold a large New Haven apartment building to Cue. In 2022, Cue bought the 124-unit Liberty apartment building on Temple Street from Beachwold for $29.1 million.
Representatives from Cue Residential did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.
According to a Historic Resources Inventory form filed by the New Haven Preservation Trust’s Charlotte Hitchcock in 2010, these two six-story apartment buildings were designed by local architect Gilbert Switzer and constructed between 1963 and 1965.
The buildings are in the “International — Corbusian — Brutalist” style.
To quote directly from the “Historical or Architectural importance” section of that form:
The design of these two linear buildings on pilotis, with their exposed “beton brut” concrete frames and sculptural penthouses, pay direct homage to the “Ville Radieuse” concept of Le Corbusier, conceived in the 1920s and most fully realized in his Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles, France of the 1940s. These are odd, however, in that they are shoehorned into an existing densely-developed matrix of 2- and 3‑story homes in traditional style and scale, rather than sitting in a cleared open landscape as Le Corbusier would have envisioned and as in the Rotival plan for downtown New Haven of 1942. These were not the product of Redevelopment Agency slum clearance, but rather the private market at work in a prosperous area of the city. Each of the gigantic megaliths occupied the narrow house lots of one or two homes, with the developer owning additional properties between and around but choosing to retain the older buildings. Compare with 60 Warren Street (see Inventory form), a similarly inspired complex sited in an open area of lawn.
The plans for these 6‑story apartment buildings came just at the time that New Haven was revising its comprehensive zoning code (1963). Fountain Street and the surrounding neighborhood streets are littered with bulky 3‑story U‑shaped brick apartment buildings, erected in the decades of the 1920s to 1950s, allowing no outdoor space and often no parking for cars. These two buildings took the formula a step further by rising to twice the height of the surrounding neighborhood. By the time construction was complete, the area had a height limit of 3 stories, and area and use limitations that would prevent other structures on this scale from being approved.
