New Haven’s zoning commissioners would have liked to put this tulip tree back together. Since they are less than gods, they did the next best thing: They denied the developer who cut it down the right to continue to construct a house on the site.
With their four to one vote of denial, the Board of Zoning Appeals on Tuesday night responded to an aroused and vocal group of some 20 residents led by Annex Alderman Alfonse Paolillo, Jr.
Their denial may have opened the city up to a potentially expensive lawsuit. Attorney Anthony Avallone, representing the developer, threatened as much.
The big tulip was felled as an innocent arboreal bystander in a complex legal situation, compounded by an error in judgment by city bureaucrats.
It all began on March 13, when two properties, 98 Hillside Ave., a vacant lot with the tulip tree, and the adjoining lot and house at 106 Hillside Ave. were bought by Hillside Avenue LLC. On the very same day the LLC sold the house and lot at 106 to one Robert Amato.
The problem was created, it turned out, three days before, on March 10. That’s when Hillside LLC received a building permit and all proper approvals from city departments to put in a foundation and footings — and in the process knock down the tulip — at 98. That permit turns out to have been issued in error because on March 10, both lots were still under single ownership, of Hillside LLC. In the complex zoning guidelines, for the excavation to have been begun legally, the two lots would first have to have been legally “unmerged” in order to allow two separate ownerships.
“In other words,” said Paolillo rhetorically, “several city departments make a mistake, grant a building permit in error, allowing this house to be built in an already very dense street with serious parking issues, and the community must bear the brunt of that?”
When the error was discovered, a cease and desist order was issued, but the tree had been lost. And Hillside residents were enraged. The sudden appearance of the hole in the street and the loss of the tree galvanized neighbors, Paolillo said, like no time in the last five or six years.
It brought to the fore resentment that the city has long ignored Hillside’s complaints: absence of sidewalks, extreme difficulty in snow plowing the well-named hilly incline, insufficient parking.
Longtime residents (left to right, Thomas Basil, Larry DeCilla, Marybeth Coppola, with Paul Kowalski and his son Joseph behind them) warned the commissioners that adding density, such as the new house represented, set a dangerous precedent. It would increase danger for children playing, and would exacerbate the difficulty of ambulances, for example, arriving to help in emergencies.
One resident said she was representative of many second or third-generation Hillsiders who live with and care for elderly parents.
As part of his case, Paolillo submitted the findings of the Department of Transportation, Traffic, and Parking which recommended against approval.
Attorney Avallone, representing developer Michael Massimino, countered that while parking is an issue for many streets in the area, the proposed house would have a two-car garage. The real issue, he said, is that the property is in a RM‑1 zone, which allows multi-family houses. He said if the request is denied, his client could still build a house there anyway. “The only issue is whether there will be two structures with two separate owners, or two structures with one owner.”
Then came the dangling of the lawsuit. “I mean there are innocent people here, who followed the rules, got the proper building permits, and the owner of 106 took out a mortgage, and now the bank is telling him he’s on a non-conforming lot? I tell you,” he said to the commissioners with genial earnestness, “the city has exposed itself to some serious dangers having acted wrongly.”
“If officials made mistakes,” countered Paolillo, “they should be punished. The neighborhood should not bear the brunt of this.”
What seemed to persuade commissioners was not the legalities but the testimonies of neighbors about the danger of the precedent that could transform their already fragile block. “Why do we have to bail these individuals out at the expense of the quality of our life?” asked David Racarro, who has lived on the block for 50 years.
The only vote to approve came from the newest member of the BZA, George Longyear. “Whether we approve or not,” he said, “is not going to solve the parking problem on Hillside.”