Wooster Sq. Builder Deemed ​“Historic”

Wooster Square native Andrew Consiglio won permission from previously skeptical historic-zone gatekeepers to build a new brick house on a Wooster Square parking lot — emerging as not only ​“appropriate” but a model in their estimation.

It took four tries over four years.

Consiglio, a local small-scale developer and a retired police captain, is now one step closer to building a two-family home at the long-vacant corner parking lot on Olive and Greene Streets, after members of New Haven’s Historic District Commission unanimously voted to give him a certificate of appropriateness Wednesday night at City Hall.

Consligio is seeking to build a seven-bedroom house at 109 Olive St., in a parking lot he bought from the city in 2012. The city has long been hoping to have that lot filled in with housing.

Consiglio has been seeking that permission for more than a year to make that happen. He needed zoning relief. He won it. But he also needed an OK from the historic commissioners — which turned out to be a hurdle.

Each time he showed up, since 2016, commissioners shredded his then-barely sketched-out plans. Those plans included hardly any details on the property-line fence, the driveway path, the entryway portico, the front door, the basement windows and the roof design, let alone any comparison to its neighbors.

Essentially, the commissioners said, they had no way of knowing whether the house would fit in with the rest of Wooster Square.

A year later, Consiglio’s team returned with an hour-long presentation that wowed the commissioners, who said it should be a model for how to apply for new construction in a historic district.

Consiglio, who was born and raised in Wooster Square, hired Peter MacPartland as his architect for the project. The Italian-American side of MacPartland’s family also lived in the neighborhood a century ago. His grandfather Pietro Scola moved to Brown Street when he emigrated here from Italy, and with his wife Madeline, ran a candy store on Chestnut Street.

At Wednesday evening’s commission meeting, McPartland presented dozens of snapshots of architectural details from other Wooster Square homes he’d copied into his designs. He hauled in a sample window and a neat arrangement of red bricks and gray shingles. He covered a wall with posters of colored renderings and blueprints.

Then, in meticulous detail, MacPartland explained almost every detail he’d chosen, right down to the height of the wrought-iron fence: 36 inches, the exact same size as the border around Wooster Square Park.

“This is the last site in the entire Wooster Square district,” MacPartland said. ​“In my opinion, it is sort of a gateway.”

“It tries to close the corner. Its size and mass tries to relate so that it is not overwhelmed by what is probably the ugly duckling on Olive Street, which is the concrete masonry building” across the street, he continued. ​“It tries to draw on the vernacular but it has its own identity.”

Commissioners said they were impressed. They thanked MacPartland for what member Doug Royalty said was ​“such a comprehensive survey” that ​“goes a long way toward addressing all of the reservations or comments that we had the last time around.”

“They should all come in like this,” added Susan Goodshall.

To Flute? Or Not To Flute?

There was still one outstanding question, though. Urban Design League’s Anstress Farwell brought it up. What should be done with the 13 Doric columns on the wraparound porch: fluted, in the Classical style with vertical grooves, or plain, in the Victorian style without detailing?

Commissioners pulled up Google Maps to look at the neighbors’ entryways and found examples of both. They debated whether the eight-foot height is grand enough to copy the ancient Greek temples, like some Chapel Street homes seemed able to pull off.

Royalty suggested it might look ​“jarring.” Tom Kimberly, the commission chair, agreed. Godshall argued the fluting would add ​“more granular detail” and ​“interest” for a passerby.

Karen Jenkins ultimately swayed the other commissioners by suggesting they should defer to MacPartland, after pointing out that every detail of his plans was ​“well thought-out and integrated with each other” — including, she said, the fluted columns.

Construction won’t be able to start immediately. Consiglio had obtained zoning relief back in 2013 to build this project with smaller side yards than usually required. But those permissions lapsed while he struggled to get the Historic District Commission’s sign-off.

MacPartland said they’ll return to the Board of Zoning Appeals ​“as soon as possible.”

Urban Menace?

Consiglio’s project isn’t the first that’s been held up — or even shut down entirely — over the Historic District Commission’s approvals. 

The commission’s usual insistence on details like the design of windows and frequency of balconies helped kill a planned new development along the Quinnipiac River this week, according to this story by the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary.

Similar concerns about window design caused over a year-plus delay and ran up extra bills for a Chinese-American immigrant seeking to revive a café in Wooster Square.

But the commission also keeps tabs on ​“at-risk” buildings across New Haven, trying to preserve the historic character of neighborhoods by fending off demolitions from owners who let their properties fall apart or tried to replace them with something bigger.

Nationally, historic commissions have been derided as a tool of elitist overreach that holds back cities, limits affordable housing, and harms the environment, as local activist Aaron Goode described in a letter to the editor about this recent New York Times column.

Goode said the commissioners spend time ​“obsessing over minutiae, brushing off the urgent need for affordable housing and mobilization against the climate crisis, and safeguarding a sterile, static version of the past.”

Describing his own neighborhood, Goode said Wooster Square was spared from ​“New Haven’s infamous ​‘urban renewal’ bulldozers through the intervention of preservationists who understood the built environment as not just a collection of buildings but as a fragile ecosystem, and the mission of historic preservation as not just conserving architectural details but as stewarding the social and cultural fabric of intact traditional neighborhoods.”

“It is troubling to see historic preservation turn away from this humanistic ethos into a set of arcane bureaucratic procedures that appear to the layperson as reactionary, elitist and contrary to social solidarity,” he wrote. “‘Putting people first’ is the preservation ethos that saved my neighborhood from annihilation and to which I will always subscribe.”