Thomas MacMillan Photos
After an 83-year-old architecture professor was attacked at the Lilac Street building site of a Yale-designed house, the university plans to pull out the newly installed foundation — and has decided it’s just too dangerous to build a home in Newhallville.
The site is at 32 Lilac St., a narrow vacant lot which was to be the location of the latest house designed and built by students at the Yale School of Architecture. For decades, architecture students have put up a new house each year, in cooperation with local housing agencies, for sale to low-income home buyers.
For 24 years, 83-year-old architecture professor Paul Brouard (pictured) has supervised building of the Yale homes. On the morning of Thursday May 9, he showed up at 32 Lilac St. for scheduled excavation work and was assaulted from behind. Someone knocked him over the head and took his wallet. Brouard said he was hospitalized overnight, but has recovered from the attack.
Yale initially decided not to allow students to work on the site while a security plan was developed to keep them safe there. The Yale School of Architecture went ahead with excavation and installed a foundation last week.
Then Yale police Chief Ronnell Higgins decided the university couldn’t guarantee the safety of students working on Lilac Street. Since completion of the house is a course requirement for first-year architecture students, architecture professor Adam Hopfner began scrambling to find another site.
With help from the city, he may have found one. The current plan is to move the foundation to a city-owned vacant lot on Greenwood Street in West River, a spot where students can work in safety.
The house was being built on Lilac Street with the cooperation of Neighborhood Housing Services, a not-for-profit developer that has for decades brought stable homes for working families to low-income New Haven neighborhoods. Yale’s withdrawal from Newhallville is a blow for a neighborhood that NHS has been working hard to lift up with “clustered” development over the last couple years. It also follows a withdrawal by Habitat For Humanity, which also decided that the neighborhood was too dangerous to build a house in. After a woman fled her Habitat-built home in 2007, the organization suspended plans for more houses there and hasn’t been back since.
“A Screeching Halt”
“I was knocked silly,” Brouard (pictured at a Yale building site last year) said, recalling the mugging. “I was attacked from behind.”
Brouard said he fell to the ground and was “in and out” of consciousness. “I think it was two people but I’m not at all sure.”
Nothing like this has happened in his all his years building Yale-designed houses in New Haven neighborhoods, Brouard said.
Hopfner said he and Brouard arrived separately to the job site on May 9. Hopfner parked on Lilac Street; Brouard parked on the south side of the lot. After speaking with the excavator operator, Hopfner walked over to meet Brouard. He saw a man lying on the ground.
“‘Lord, please don’t let this be Paul,’” Hopfner recalled thinking. “I get there, and he’s been beaten unconscious.”
Hopfner said he went to the hospital with Brouard, made sure he was stabilized. Then he met with Alan Organschi, another architecture professor, and the dean and associate dean of the department. Hopfner said they decided to proceed with construction, but not to let students on-site until they had a plan for their security.
Excavation went ahead. Last Wednesday, Hopfner oversaw the installation of the house’s pre-fab foundation.
Then late on Wednesday evening, Hopfner got a call from Associate Dean John Jacobson, who told him that Chief Higgins had “essentially said he could not guarantee the safety of students on Lilac Street.”
The university kept the incident, and its decision, out of the public limelight. Higgins referred questions Tuesday to Yale public relations, which did not return a call for comment.
No students, no house. “The building project came to a screeching halt at 10 p.m. Wednesday,” Hopfner said.
On Thursday, Hopfner started making “frantic calls.” By Friday evening, with the help of the Livable City Initiative’s Erik Johnson, Hopfner had found a possible new site to build the house: 116 Greenwood St. in West River.
“So we are doing everything we can to mobilize and make that happen,” Hopfner said. “I’m literally in crisis mode right now.”
The building project already had a very tight time frame. So relocating an already-installed foundation is a setback. Hopfner said he may not be able to break ground on Greenwood Street until the second week of June. In the meantime, he’s trying to find warehouse space where he can start building with the architecture students, turning the building into a partially prefabricated endeavor.
“A Piece Of The Pie”
“It’s an unfortunate circumstance that someone chose to attack an 83-year-old man doing something good in the neighborhood,” said LCI’s Johnson (pictured).
Johnson said he understands Yale’s decision to pull out of the neighborhood. The university has to ensure the safety of faculty and students, who are completing the house as a course requirement. Nevertheless, he said he’s “disappointed” in the decision, he said. “It’s bad for the neighborhood and it’s bad for residents who are trying to make positive change happen.”
“It’s a miserable, miserable situation,” said Jim Paley, head of NHS. His agency has been doing intensive housing rehab work in targeted blocks of Newhallville. “We’ve been working hard in all of our clusters. Everything had been percolating there. This is a real setback.”
Paley said NHS is working to rehab three other properties on the block. “This was going to be a real showpiece of a block.”
He said NHS will fill in the excavated hole and then divide 32 Lilac St. between the two houses on either side, one of which NHS owns.
Claudette Deer, who owns the house on the west side of the lot, said she saw the aftermath of Thursday’s attack. She looked out her window and saw Brouard on the ground. “He was laying out like he was dead. The man got hit hard.”
Deer said the attack shows that the street needs more attention from the police department. She said people know when the cops are less likely to be out. “They know when the shifts are and when to act up.”
Yale’s withdrawal will work out well for Deer. She said she might get space for parking on her property. “I’m going to get a piece of the pie.”
“I ain’t sorry,” said Diane Pearson, who lives across the street. She said she doesn’t mind a new house being built, but she’d like to see it built with local paid labor, not by Yale students. “I just don’t like the way they do it. … People here do really need jobs.”
“They’d Be Safe”
Hopfner said the architecture school will have to do a “post-mortem” on the situation to figure out if the safety “threshold” for choosing future building sites has to change. He said he would like to see the Yale building project return to Newhallville at some point.
“The reason I’m doing this is because I think that it is something for the common good,” Hopfner said. “You know, we’re not building on St. Ronan St. I’m certainly committed to the social agenda of this thing.”
“We’re not just going to lay down and play dead because of the intimidation,” said Paley. “We’re not giving up on this neighborhood.”
Meanwhile, on Greenwood Street Tuesday morning, 72-year-old Lee Williams was getting ready to mow his neighbor’s lawn. He said building a new house at 116 Greenwood (pictured above) sounded like a great idea. “It’d be beautiful for the neighborhood.”
Yale architecture students wouldn’t need to worry about crime in the neighborhood, Williams said. “I think they’d be safe.”