Paul Bass Photo
Joel Schiavone in his Chapel Street pad.
It looks like Joel Schiavone will get to enjoy the downtown he helped revive for at least two more years.
Schiavone — the 80-year-old banjo-strumming developer whose renovation of the College-Chapel district in the 1980s set the stage for the city’s subsequent “new urbanist” revival —was facing eviction from the apartment he’s renting near the corner of Chapel and Howe. His landlord, the Lincoln Society — his former pals at a Yale secret society which he helped revive — went to court to throw him out of the apartment on half of the second floor of a 2,551-square-foot circa-1885 Victorian multifamily home he helped renovate. Schiavone fought the eviction and disputed charges of nonpayment of rent. (Click here for a story detailing their dispute.)
That case was about to come before Judge Anthony Avallone in state housing court Tuesday when the two sides reached an out-of-court settlement, according to Norm Pattis, Schiavone’s attorney: His lease will be extended for two years. He’ll pay the current $1,150 monthly rent the first year, then $1,950 the second.
“Fraternal loyalty triumphed in the end,” Pattis said. “Joel and the Lincoln Society go back a long way.” He also said the society acknowledged “pragmatic reality.”
1255 Chapel St., which the Lincoln Society and Schiavone call home.
Society attorney Anne Leavitt did not return a request for comment.
Schiavone said he was pleased with the settlement. He figures he may have to move to the suburbs anyway in 2019 when his wife is expected to be released from prison (where she went following a conviction in a shoreline “gifting table” case).
“I still don’t know,” Schiavone said, “why they [the society] wanted to throw me out.”