No Post-Teardown Plan?

Yale said it has no plans — really, it swears — for the site of a soon-to-be-demolished former pawn shop on a Chapel Street block the university mostly owns.

Historic district commissioners questioned that statement, since the building has been in poor shape for 25 years and the university just spent millions buying it.

Such skepticism was expressed Wednesday night during the regular monthly meeting of the Historic District Commission on the second floor of City Hall.

The subject of conversation was 1142 Chapel St., a two-story, 12,400 square-foot vacant retail space on the southern side of the block in between Hull’s and Book Trader Cafe.

Yale Lead Planner Jeromy Powers gave the commissioners an update on the university’s plans to knock down the structure after receiving an emergency demolition order from the city’s Building Department in October.

The tear-down should take place in the next few weeks, he said.

That’s because a fire from 1992, which left city firefighter Tom Kelly with a traumatic brain injury when he fell through an uncovered 30-foot-airshaft, also caused structural damage that has only gotten worse in the intervening years.

The roof is falling down in parts, he said. The floors have been burnt, and the second floor is missing entirely. One can see down to the basement, which itself is riddled with holes and debris.

“It’s been deemed unsafe,” Powers said. ​“We’re trying to correct for that liability.”

City Building Official Jim Turcio confirmed the unsafe nature of the structure Thursday morning.

“You can walk in probably eight feet of that building, and then you’re risking your life,” he said.

Turcio said the city initially put a demolition order on the property back in 1992 after that most recent fire.

Then in 2016, Turcio officially removed that demolition order for the property’s then-new owner, Pike International’s Shmully Hecht.

Turcio said he did a walk-through of the building at the time . Though it was in a poor state of repair even then, Hecht had plans to develop the property. Turcio said he wanted to give the new landlord a chance to save the building, which he said was still salvageable at that point.

These three years later, Turcio said, the building is beyond repair based on a walk-through he and his team did after Yale bought 1142 Chapel and 166 York St. from Hecht’s holding company for $3.8 million in June.

A structural engineer’s report written by Spiegel Zamecnik & Shah on April 22 notes that ​“the original floor was seen to have holes from rot, are missing, and generally show severe deterioration. Many joists show indications of water, some with signs of biological rot. At the center of the building on the east side, it appears the roof has partially collapsed due to the fire and was partially reconstructed. … [The] fire damaged bearing wall on the right side is buckling.”

Thus the emergency demolition order on Oct. 22, Turcio said. The university would have had to spend over $100,000 just to stabilize the building and keep it from collapsing during the winter.

“A Missing Tooth Is Really Difficult”

What raised commissioners’ eyebrows Wednesday night was Powers’s insistence that the university has no plans for the 1142 Chapel St. site after it knocks the building down.

“This whole block has so much vitality now,” HDC Chair Trina Learned said. ​“To have a missing tooth is really difficult.”

What about a community garden? Commissioner Karen Jenkins asked. A pop-up store of some kind?

“At this point there’s no plan for the property,” Powers said.

That’s what Yale spoksperson Karen Peart recently told the Independent, too. ​“We have been working with the City of New Haven Building Department, which required that the building be demolished because it is not safe,” she wrote in an email statement. ​“We are now in the process of securing a demolition permit. There are no current plans for the site.”

Downtown Alder Abby Roth pointed out that the university already owns nearly the entirely block.

“There has to be some long-term plan for this,” she said. ​“There has to be some reason for buying a building that’s going to crumble.”

“Why did Yale decide to buy the building?” Jenkins asked again.

“There is no plan in place currently,” Powers replied. He also confirmed that the university does own almost the entirety of that southwestern corner of Chapel Street and York Street. According to the city assessor’s database, Yale owns properties at 1126 Chapel, 1142 Chapel, 1156 Chapel, 142 York, 146 York, 148 York, 150 York, 166 York. The only properties at that corner it does not own are 168 York, 170 York, 1144 Chapel, and 1150 Chapel.

“So there’s no plan,” Jenkins mused. ​“Just buying up the property because it’s a hazard.”

New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell urged the commissioners to ask Yale to find a way to preserve the manufactured stone facade. The building was likely built in 1923, though it’s listed as a non-contributing structure in the national Chapel Street Historic District.

Perhaps the university could keep the facade in place and build a new building behind or above it? Farwell asked. Or it could relocate the facade to a different project in a different part of town to preserve its handscome contribution to the streetscape? Or it could simply preserve it and store it as a historical artifact of sort?

“It could have a future life of some sort,” Farwell said. ​“This is all discretionary. It’s all voluntary. But we can always ask.”

New Haven Preservation Trust Director of Preservation Services Elizabeth Holt said the building is clearly not falling into the street right now, and that the university should be able to preserve it. That is, if the building department hadn’t already issued an emergency demolition order.

HDC Commissioner Susan Godshall agreed. ​“If it was genuinely an emergency demolition order,” she said, ​“we wouldn’t be here tonight.”