Thomas Breen Photo
Tenant “Q” and her two kids prepare to retrieve belongings.
Hillhouse high sophomore Angel Fletcher, leaves 66 Norton after packing his bags.
Eighty New Haveners had 45 minutes to pack up their belongings and flee their homes Thursday night when officials temporarily condemned a 41-unit apartment complex on Norton Street because of unsafe conditions.
Representatives from the city’s fire department, police department, building department, and Livable City Initiative (LCI), the city’s anti-blight agency, were on hand to help the owner’s representative, Mendy Katz, alert his tenants that they had to pack just their essentials and vacate the building’s premises within the prescribed 45 minutes.
Frustrated tenants returned home from work to find that their apartment building had been condemned. Tenants already in the building spent the evening streaming through its front doors, carrying backpacks and blankets and bundles of clothing. Children clutched the hands of parents and grandparents as they walked out into the cold evening rain, many wearing little more than hoodies, sweaters and pajamas.
66 Norton St. on Thursday night, soon after the city temporarily condemned the apartment complex for being structurally unsafe.
That was the scene at 66 Norton St., a five-story, 41-unit apartment complex owned by the Brooklyn-based realtor Ernest Schemitsch through his property holding company, 66 Norton Apartments, LLC. The tan brick building is more than 100 years old.
Assistant Fire Chief Mark Vendetto said that LCI and an independent structural engineer had called the fire department at around 3 p.m. Thursday to report that the building was structurally unsafe to inhabit.
Assistant fire chief Mark Vendetto at the scene.
Vendetto said that LCI and the building department had raised some concerns with Katz’s management company earlier this year when they came by the property for an annual building license inspection. After that initial inspection, the city arranged with Katz to hire an independent structural engineer to meet city officials at the property so that they could assess the building together.
What LCI, the building department and the engineer found, according to Vendetto, was a serious cause for alarm: ceiling leaks, sagging floors and rotting wood throughout the complex’s bathrooms, hallways and living rooms.
City officials huddle with property manager Mendy Katz outside 66 Norton St. as they strategize about how best to evacuate current occupants.
City Fire Marshal Bobby Doyle and Building Official Jim Turcio said that there are also potential problems with the building’s support beams stretching from the basement all the way up to the fifth floor. They said that these problems are not uncommon with older buildings like 66 Norton. They plan to return to the building Friday or on Monday with the property manager’s structural engineer and with construction workers to open up some walls and take a look at just how precarious the support beams are.
“You can see that there is some sagginess and some very soft spots in the floors as you walk up,” Vendetto said.
“This building’s going to be vacant for a while,” Turcio said Friday morning after seeing an engineer’s report.
Officials arranged for rooms at three different hotels to house the 80 people who had to leave 66 Norton Thursday night. Katz will work with them to find permanent housing. Six of the tenants went on their own to the hotels, according to Doyle; 74 others were transported by bus. Doyle estimated that two dozen children are among those relocated.
Mendy Katz (right) with colleague Stacy O’Connell.
“As a precaution, we had an engineer’s report done on this property because there were questions about the stability of certain things in the basement,” Katz said. “And it came up that there might be an issue. And for that reason, as a precaution, we’re vacating the property and we’ll do our best to rehouse these tenants for the next couple of days.”
He said that his management company will pay for the tenants to be relocated to nearby hotels for the next couple of days.
“Our goal is to make sure that the building is 100 percent before anyone moves back in,” he said.
The building has a long history of problems dating to before Schemitsch bought the property in 2015 for $2.5 million. It earned the nickname “New Jack City” when it was run by a major real estate firm in town, Mandy Management. A 2013 fire there left 11 tenants temporarily homeless. Incidents there this decade include a homicide, a mob beating, and a baby abduction.
Stuffed Animals, Bags Of Clothing
Chris Mercado and his son Jojo as they leave their home at 66 Norton St.
Outside the apartment on Thursday night, tenants were confused, then incredulous, then angry but unsurprised about the city’s condemnation of the building.
Chris Mercado, a tenant on the fifth floor who has lived in the building for a little over a year, walked towards Norton Street with his son Jojo, smiling but unsure about where he would spend the night.
“I just got home from work,” he said. “We’re just playing it by ear right now.”
He said that he did not have any family in the area, since he moved to New Haven from New York City just over a year ago.
James Brown and his two children, who live with their mom at 66 Norton St.
James Brown waited on the sidewalk to pick up his son and daughter, who were living in 66 Norton St. with their mom. His daughter, Teresa, left the building holding a large, pink stuffed animal.
Hillhouse high sophomore Angel Fletcher, leaves his apartment after packing bags.
Sigourney Whitley left carrying his belongings over his shoulders in two giant black trash bags. Angel Fletcher, a 15-year-old sophomore at Hillhouse High, carried a rolled up comforter under his arm and tried to keep his clothing dry in a white plastic trash bag.
A number of tenants said that the building is unsanitary and unsafe, and that management has refused to address their concerns with the upkeep of the property.
Some said that Katz even threatened, and followed through on, evicting tenants if they complained too much about the state of the building.
“They got rats in the refrigerators and the ovens,” a woman who identified herself as “Q” said as she held her two children on the sidewalk outside the building. “They just nasty.”
Evictions
Denisse Ferrer.
Denisse Ferrer, 23, said that she had just been in housing court earlier in the day, where Katz and his management company had successfully filed for her eviction.
She said that, after she refused to pay rent in protest of alleged mold and a broken heater, Katz served her with the eviction papers.
Katz said the problems began when Ferrer lost her job, failed to pay rent for three months, and broke a window.
He noted that the “judge ruled in my favor” after reviewing all the evidence in court.
Lindsey Yeaton’s apartment.
Katz said that he was seeking to repair damage in the basement when he called in the inspectors in the first place: That’s how the potential structural problems were discovered.
He said the leaks from Ferrer’s apartment caused much of the damage in the basement.
That damage was on display in Lindsey Yeaton’s basement apartment.
“There are mushrooms growing back there,” Yeaton said as she pointed to an exposed area of the kitchen wall that was spongy with brown flecks. The ceiling above her oven was brown and sagging, soft and torn from what she and her son described as constant leaks from the floor above.
Ceiling in the Yeaton’s living room.
In the living room, Yeaton pointed out a thick brown ceiling stain above a cracked wall.
Ceiling in Jason’s bedroom.
In her son’s bedroom, Yeaton pointed out a two-foot wide crack in the ceiling above a radiator grate right on top of her son’s bed.
“Every time people bang upstairs,” Jason said, “parts of the ceiling fall down.”
Door frame out of square indicates movement of the structure, an indicator of potential structural collapse.