Nora Grace-Flood Photos
From partial demolition ...
... to delivery. Developers finally get Pinto House into right position Monday.
New Haven’s 200-year-old William Pinto House inched closer Monday to its new destination: A plot of now-torn-up asphalt and dirt roughly 90 feet away from where it was originally built circa 1810.
High Caliber Contracting pushed the historic house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a final few feet Monday, making space for a seven-story, 102-unit market-rate apartment building planned to occupy the 269, 275 and 283 Orange St.
The journey has been months in the making. The house will eventually be moved a few feet more, to complete the journey.
The house is being preserved and moved, rather than torn down, to make way for 57 new studios, 39 one-bedroom apartments, six two-bedroom apartments, 4,200 square feet of ground-floor commercial space, and 44 parking spots. In return for public permission to do that, White Plains, N.Y.-based developer Gerald Seligsohn’s agreed to pay to preserve the Pinto House — which has ties to some of the earliest Jewish settlers to New Haven as well as famed inventor Eli Whitney — and roll it 87 feet closer to the neighboring CT Children’s Building.
The state signed off on Seligsohn’s plan — which his attorney Jim Segaloff, called a “time-consuming, arduous” process that would result in “considerable time lost by the developer” — to lift and relocate the Pinto House back in August of 2020.
But Operation Reposition-Pinto remains incomplete. Monday marked the first day that the Pinto House finally hovered above its future foundation, while its old location at 275 Orange was filled with gravel.
Since the beginning of 2022, construction workers have been figuring out how to keep the house’s famed roots intact while tearing it from the ground and pushing it inch-by-inch to its appropriate place.
In December, the house's addition was torn down.
In late December, the 1987 brick addition attached to the rear of the home was demolished. The foundation stones lining the base of the Pinto House were detached from the site’s foundation, and a table of steel was assembled underneath the building.
In January, the house was ready to be lifted off its original foundation by a system of hydraulic jacks attached to the series of beams and steel parts lining the building’s base. Those jacks were placed on rollers that were then used to skate the house foot by foot over to the new location 90 feet away.
By mid April, the house was successfully moved 90 feet away to make space for new apartments and parking spaces.
High Caliber Contracting partner Clay Markham said on Monday that while the house is now in just the right spot to be lowered, it will take at least three more weeks to fill the new basement dug underneath the house. First, foundation must be poured into the ditch, which is currently filled with wooden cribbing to hold the house up.
Then the age-old stones stripped from the house’s old foundation will be reattached.
And history will be successfully preserved — and updated.