The city’s top building official Tuesday ordered the building at left partially demolished after the back of it collapsed in the downtown Ninth Square neighborhood. Meanwhile, downtown activist Scott Healy (above) charged the owners with endangering the public and marring the neighborhood through “demolition by neglect.”
The rear of the abandoned building, at 11 Orange St. near the corner of George, collapsed Monday night. A homeless man was living there at the time. Bricks tumbled onto an adjoining parking lot.
The historic but rundown two-story building has been an eyesore in a stretch of the downtown Ninth Square neighborhood otherwise reviving with tasteful brick apartments, restaurants, shops, galleries, and live music.
The building is owned by Fred and Kimmy Leaf, a local attorney and photographer, respectively. For years they have battled with preservationists over the building. They wanted to knock it down to build a new four-story building in its wake. Opponents like Healy, who runs the Town Green Special Services District, argued that the century-old brick structure, once known as the Rundbaken Engraving Building, should be preserved. The matter went before the state Historic Commission District, which ruled that the Leafs must preserve the facade, but not the whole building. Under a compromise with City Hall that left few people satisfied, the Leafs agreed to build their new four-story structure behind the facade 15 feet to the south of an adjoining building. (Click here to read more about the background dispute from Wednesday’s Register.)
“It was a terrible compromise. It’s the worst in urban planning you could ever imagine,” Healy argued. “It’s a building you want to reference when you describe the scale of the Ninth Square,” a “walking neighborhood.”
Worse, Healy worried about the precedent. The Leafs, he said, knew the building was in an historic district when they bought it, which means they were supposed to preserve it, not knock it down to building something bigger. “If the Leafs succeed in their quest to demolish this building, New Haven sends a clear message to other property owners: if you want to build a new house, and a historic, publicly-protected building stands in your way, just sit on it and wait for it to crumble. That’s a terrible precedent that undermines the very reason for National Register Historic District recognition,” Healy argued.
Worst of all, since that compromise more than four years ago, the Leafs have let the building sit and deteriorate, Healy charged. So it became a public-safety problem as well as an aesthetic problem. Garbage piled up, graffiti marred the outside. The man squatting there “could have been killed” because of the poor conditions that led to the collapse. (He fortunately wasn’t hurt.)
“This was demolition by neglect,” Healy charged.
Kimmy Leaf, encountered up the block outside her photography studio, said she has “no idea” why the back of the building collapsed. “It’s an old building,” she said.
She dismissed Healy’s charge with a scoff. “He’s awful,” she said. She referred further questions to her husband. His secretary referred questions to another attorney, who couldn’t be reached for comment.
Andrew Rizzo (pictured), who runs the city’s Building Department, took sharp exception to Healy’s charges.
Rizzo originally told the Leafs to have someone demolish the whole building, out of fears for public safety. Then, “because Scott raised questions, I said I’m willing to take a look” at whether the front of the building could still be saved. “If we can save it, we’ll save it. If not, we’ll knock it down.” He ordered the rear demolished immediately.
Rizzo said he hopes on Wednesday to get some sense of what caused the collapse. So far he doesn’t know the cause. He was skeptical of Healy’s claim of “demolition by neglect” by the Leafs.
“How can you prove that?” Rizzo said. “We have buildings all over the city that have been vacant 10, 15 years. Do all [the owners] want their buildings to fall down? How can you get in someone’s mind like that?” He said possible causes could include “all the rain we’ve had” or “vibrations from the Coliseum,” which the city is in the process of demolishing a block away.