Michelle Turner Photo
A tagger struck again. His message won’t last long, based on prior experience.
The blue graffiti showed up on the side of the old Hallocks store on Whalley in the heart of Westville Village. A tagger keeps spraying the wall, and neighbors aren’t pleased: They’ve worked hard to bring about a renaissance of the area.
Neighbors expressed their frustration about the graffiti at Wednesday night’s Westville-West Hills March Management Team meeting on Valley Street.
“You can see if from the parking lot of the [next-door Beth-El Keser Israel] synagogue,” one resident said.
Neighbors asked officials whether the city can step in and clean the graffiti as soon as it appears.
Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood worker Elaine Braffman (pictured with Paul Chambers of Westville) responded that she’ll call the building’s owner, the Church of Scientology. It’s their job to clean the wall, she said, and “the church is very good about getting it off the building.” Tags have also appeared ont he back of the building, facing Valley Street.
“They have volunteers in the church who remove the graffiti. They’re very good about it,” Braffman said. “I’ll put out a call to them. I can leave a message that says, ‘graffiti alert,’ and she’ll know what I mean.”
Braffman was referring to the Church of Scientology and its local pastor, Carolyn Yingling. The church purchased the 3,500 square-foot, three-story building, first used as a Masonic Temple in 1926, in 2003 for $1.5 million. It has yet to renovate it and move in; the church’s headquarters remains two blocks east in a Whalley storefornt.
Reached by phone Wednesday night, Yingling sighed when informed about the latest graffiti.
“I just got back from Miami. Graffiti again? I haven’t had a chance to see it,” she said. “We just cleaned that up in the fall. It’s a beautiful blank wall. I wish they would invent a paint where it [spray paint] would just slide off.”
“When we first bought the building, [Westville activist] Thea Buxbaum said to me, ‘It’s so much easier to build from scratch than renovate,’” Yingling said. “And now I know that’s true.”
It took a while to remove asbestos from the building, she said. “That was done by a parishioner who is a contractor. He would come out between jobs and have his crew work on it.”
The church still needs to put in sprinklers that are up to fire code. The elevators has to be retrofitted to a standard size. A new water main is needed.
Putting in sprinklers that are up to fire code, the elevator has to be retrofit [cut to standard size] and a new water main are the hold up, for now.
“[Previous owner] Hallocks was grandfathered in for the elevator. We were not,” she said. “Either we hire the guy with the white gloves to run the elevator, or change the size of the elevator shaft.”
She said she doesn’t have a completion date for the work: “I’m not saying! The last time I said it, we found something else wrong! I don’t want to jinx it … You know how you clean out a closet, but it looks like a mess? That’s the stage we’re in. An awful lot has been done. It’s the most frustrating part of renovating. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Thea Buxbaum said when graffiti is found in Westville, it usually gets removed quickly. She called Westville “the most energized neighborhood in New Haven. People come from all over New Haven and suburbs to eat at our cafes and pubs.”