392 Quinnipiac, built by Lorenzo Button around 1850, in its final days earlier this year.
One of the last surviving working buildings of the city’s great 19th century oystering era is no more, the victim of what one city officials called “demolition by neglect.”
Until last month, the building stood at 392 Quinnipiac Ave. near the Ferry Street round-about.
The modest blue building, abandoned by a range of owners at least for the last decade, was already looking frail when Gregory Bodytko and his company Abcon Abatement bought the structure last year.
In March Bodytko appeared before the Historic District Commission (HDC) requesting permission to tear down the building, which he pronounced unfixable.
The commission first asked to be convinced through a formal report of a preservation-trained structural engineer before it would issue a COA, or certificate of appropriateness, which is required for the demolition to proceed.
Abcon Abatement has for many years been on the city’s list of approved small contractors. Bodytko asserted that all his builder friends agreed that years of abandonment had rendered the building unstable and unfixable and that his plans to put in office space there would not work.
Allan Appel Photo
The remains of 392 Quinnipiac.
Commissioners chided Bodytko, as someone who has done business with the city, for not knowing the building was in a historic district. They told him an impartial engineers’s report would be required, not the word of his colleagues.
Former Buildings Department Director Andy Rizzo, who was consulting on behalf of Bodytko at the HDC meeting, said in his remarks that the poor building had been under at least two demolition orders, one in 1996 and one in 2012, but they had not been followed through on by his successors.
The project had “fallen through the cracks,” he said; or, if you are anthropomorphically inclined, you might say the building itself was trying to survive.
The commissioners voted to keep the matter open until the April meeting, at which time they requested Bodytko to present the findings of the report. Before they concluded, the commissioners also said they were unhappy about the galvanized chain link fence that had been thrown up, also with the required okay of the HDC.
Roll the clock forward to the end of the July, and the building was down.
“This is a sad case of demolition by neglect,” City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg wrote in an email. “The building dated from the early to mid-nineteenth century. It was in a local historic district, and all of this was known to the current owners.
“The HDC reluctantly issued a COA when the building had become so structurally compromised there was no alternative.”
Preservation Officer John Herzan of the New Haven Preservation Trust offered this epitaph:
The demolition of the historic mid-nineteenth-century Lorenzo Button house at 392 Quinnipiac Avenue is unfortunate. Back in 1982 when the property was inventoried by the New Haven Preservation Trust, the house was described as an unusually well-preserved example of a small Greek Revival-style house, one of several found throughout the Quinnipiac River Historic District. Its gradual neglect and eventual loss is particularly troublesome. Modest vernacular buildings such as this are increasingly rare; their survival enriches our understanding of the past. All that remains of the Button house today is its evocative presence in a wonderfully descriptive original landscape painting of the Quinnipiac River waterfront area in the collection of the New Haven Museum. The restoration of the actual house would have been additionally meaningful to our community.
A COA is required for not only demoliton but for plans for a replacement structure in a historic district.
Asked his future plans for the site, Dan Masto, a longtime employee at Abcon Abatement replied, “To be determined.”