Thomas Breen photo
1142 Chapel St.
The city’s Building Department has ordered Yale University to demolish a structurally unsound former pawn shop on Chapel Street that it recently bought as part of a $3 million-plus deal with Pike International.
City Building Official Jim Turcio sent the university that demolition order on Oct. 22 for the two-story, retail-office building at 1142 Chapel St.
Turcio’s order notes that an Oct. 1 city inspection revealed that “the structure has been open to the weather since 1992 and major structural damage has occurred.”
The order states that the university must hire a state-licensed demolition contractor and obtain the required demolition permits from the city Building Department within 30 days of receipt of said notice.
Click here to download Turcio’s demolition order.
“We have been working with the City of New Haven Building Department, which required that the building be demolished because it is not safe,” Yale spokesperson Karen Peart told the Independent in an emailed statement. “We are now in the process of securing a demolition permit. There are no current plans for the site.”
Yale purchased the long-vacant downtown building between York Street and Park Street on June 4 as part of a $3.8 million deal with 1142 Chapel LLC, a holding company owned by Pike’s Shmully Hecht. Hecht in turn had owned the building for three years.
According to the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary’s deep dive into the history of this property back in 2016, 1142 Chapel used to house a jewelry store, a design facility, and a pawn shop, and suffered from four fires between the 1970s and early 1990s, with the most recent taking place in 1992.
That same year, O’Leary then wrote, a 33-year-old New Haven firefighter named Tom Kelly suffered a traumatic brain injury when “he fell through an uncovered 30-foot air shaft that was part of a second-story addition at 1142 Chapel St.”
