Thomas Breen photo
Broken windows, for now, at 188 Bassett.
New Haven Adult Education’s planned move from the Hill to Newhallville took a key step forward, as the zoning board cleared the way for the city to build a new 4,500 square-foot addition to the back of a derelict building on Bassett Street.
The Board of Zoning Appeals took that unanimous vote during its latest monthly online meeting on June 18.
The board voted to approve the City of New Haven’s application for a variance to allow a building coverage of 56 percent where a maximum of 30 percent is permitted at 188 Bassett St.
That’s the long-vacant, two-story brick office building on Bassett Street near the Farmington Canal Trail that used to be the local outpost of the state Department of Social Services.
It’s been empty for over a decade. The city bought the building for $900,000 in 2019 under then-Mayor Toni Harp’s leadership.
The Harp administration originally sought to convert the building into a worker-owned laundry facility. The Elicker administration dropped those plans and — with the backing of Board of Education vote of support in August 2022 – decided to turn the publicly owned empty eyesore instead into a new community center and home for Adult Ed, which is currently located on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn explained to the zoning board that the city and school system have received financial support from New Haven’s state delegation for this project “to the tune of $27.5 million.”
The city’s “about halfway through design” for the new Adult Ed home, he said. “We’re now starting to go through our zoning approvals.”
With the first being the variance request to the BZA.
The current building takes up around 24,000 square feet of the property’s 50,000 square-foot lot, he said. That’s roughly a 47 percent coverage.
The city plans to build a 4,500 square-foot addition in the back of the building “to support some of the requirements of an adult education center, in particular our culinary and manufacturing teaching uses that are difficult to accommodate in a renovation of a building,” Zinn said.
“Even more importantly,” he added, “the geotechnical conditions of the site, the soil conditions, make it very prohibitive for us to add a third story to this building. The building is built on deep piles. Having to add more of those within an existing building is next to impossible.”
Thus the planned 4,500 square-foot addition — which would bring the building’s lot coverage to around 56 percent.
“I wholeheartedly move to approve this,” BZA Chair Mildred Melendez said. With that, the commissioners voted unanimously in support. Next up for this project, Zinn said, is a submission to the City Plan Commission, which should happen soon.
188 Bassett St.