Dwight Double Demolition Debated

The Feldman brothers development team plans on knocking down not one but two historic Howe Street buildings to make way for 30 new market-rate apartments. The brothers, along with the city’s preservation trust, say the buildings are rotted and beyond repair.

A Dwight preservationist concerned about the impact on an historic district is mounting a campaign to save the buildings by encouraging the developers to practice adaptive reuse instead.

The budding dispute shines a light on a neighborhood in flux, replete with historic 19th-century, single- and two-family homes steadily sharing more and more space with modern, denser apartment complexes like the Novella and a new 60-plus-unit development planned for 140 Howe.

At this month’s meeting of the Dwight Community Management Team at Amistad Academy on Edgewood Avenue, neighborhood activist Olivia Martson called out the Feldman brothers’ MOD Equities firm for its plans to knock down both 95 Howe St. and 97 Howe St. to clear space for its new proposed 30-unit apartment complex.

Jacob and Josef Feldman, the New York City-based owners of the New Haven-based development and property management company, announced their new housing project at the previous month’s Dwight management team meeting.

They told neighbors last month that they plan on demolishing the vacant two-story office building at 95 Howe. They did not mention that they also plan on demolishing the vacant three-story, six-unit apartment building at 97 Howe. MOD Equities purchased both properties in 2016.

“Both these structures were built in the first half of the 19th century,” Martson said at the subsequent meeting, held Tuesday night. ​“They are more than 170 years old.”

She said she plans to file an application with the city’s Historic District Commission (HDC) to review whether or not the two buildings should be preserved. Both the developer and the city’s zoning staff argue that the developer has the legal right to demolish the buildings ​“as of right.”

“The question we ask ourselves,” Martson said, ​“is: Why demolish these houses in our neighborhood when so many developers are doing adaptive reuse of historic buildings?”

Jacob Feldman told the Independent that he did not intend to mislead last month. He said the confusion likely stemmed from him referring to the new development at last month’s meeting as ​“95 Howe,” even though the project spans both 95 Howe and 97 Howe.

Click here to download site plans for the proposal of 95 – 97 Howe that MOD Equities has submitted to the City Plan department.

“Unfortunately the buildings over the years were not maintained properly,” Feldman said about why MOD Equities plans to knock them both down.

He said that 97 Howe in particular suffers from a rotted exterior, rotted replacement siding, a rotted porch, and continually reworked flooring and bathrooms. Even the New Haven Preservation Trust agrees that the buildings may not be worth salvaging, he said. (See more below.)

“Unfortunately there’s nothing left to preserve,” he said.

Martson, a former alder, founding member of the Friends of the Dwight Street Historic District, and longtime historic preservation advocate, described the many extant architectural elements on 97 Howe that she said make it appropriate for the neighborhood and well worth preserving.

“What we’re losing is verandas, double doors, overhangs, eyebrows, lots of really nice details,” she said.

According to the federal National Register of Historic Places, 97 Howe was built around 1845, in the Italianate style. The three-story clapboard building has a ​“hip roof,” a flat-roofed cupola, a two-story Colonial Revival porch, a third-floor balcony, and an original double-leaf front door.

The two-story, brick and wood-shingled Greek Revival building at 95 Howe was built around 1835.

Martson criticized the design included in the MOD Equities site plan submission to the City Plan department as a six story ​“cookie-cutter” residential complex that places its pedestrian entrance in an alley facing 91 Howe. The proposed design positions the building’s first-floor garage along Howe Street, leaving the streetscape with nothing to look at but cars, she said.

“This is a suburban building,” she said, ​“not a historic building that should be in the neighborhood.”

Jacob Feldman told the Independent that MOD Equities has not yet finalized the building’s design. He said he hopes to have the project up for review at this month’s City Plan Commission meeting.

He also said that MOD Equities has conducted adaptive reuse at other residential properties it owns in East Rock and Downtown, but that Howe Street properties are simply beyond repair.

“We try very hard to always maintain and save where we can,” he said. But for these two properties, ​“it’s not something I think we’ll be able to save.” He said he even toured the two buildings with a representative from the New Haven Preservation Trust, but that even that local preservation society found that the buildings were beyond repair.

Elizabeth Holt, the preservation trust’s director of preservation services, confirmed that she had toured nearly every room of 97 Howe with the Feldmans, and foundhe building to be in ​“pretty bad condition.”

“The whole house is very uneven,” she told the Independent. ​“It’s settled in a lot of places. A lot of the flooring has been changes. There’s some wood floors left, but most of the kitchens and bathrooms were completely ripped out in the ​‘80s. They were ​‘80s retrofits.”

She added that the front porches are in poor condition. Some members of the trust’s preservation committee also believe that the porches are probably not original to the house, she said.

“I will never take the position that demolishing a historic building is OK,” she said. ​“The unfortunate fact is that for many, many years this building has not been taken care of. If they were to sell the property and move on and decide to not develop here, who’s going to buy it and do the work to save it? Or is it going to remain a blighted building for another decade? We’re just trying to be realistic and support a design for a new building that will be appropriate for the neighborhood.”

Brian McGrath, the president of the Chapel West Special Services District, said his organization stands firmly behind MOD Equities’ new development, which he praised for bringing 30 new apartments and therefore 30 new tenants, students, shoppers, and pedestrians to the neighborhood.

“We’re very happy that we have this new owner and to support this project,” he said. ​“This is much better for the city, much better for Chapel West.”

Even McGrath had not known that the Feldmans plan on knocking down not just the small office building at 95 Howe, but also the slightly larger residential building at 97 Howe.

“If they could save the old house and still be allowed to build what they need to build in the rear of that,” he said, ​“we’d be 100 percent in favor of that.”

He said he would be happy to see the historic building saved, as long as that work doesn’t imperil the project or the developer’s pocket book.

“I don’t believe we should be bullying the developer into spending more money than he needs to spend,” he said.

Dwight Alder Frank Douglass was yet another neighborhood resident surprised to learn about MOD Equities’ intention to knock down not one but two buildings to make way for this new development. Douglass had been at the February management team meeting when the Feldmans presented, but not at the March meeting when Martson presented. He didn’t learn about 97 Howe’s demolition fate until the Independent asked him for his reaction.

“I am opposed to them knocking that building down,” he said. ​“That’s a shocker to me, too. This is just another developer not being truthful and not being upfront, as they say. It makes me leery on the whole project moving forward.”

He went on to express skepticism that the neighborhood needed more market-rate apartments at all.

“I’m an advocate for affordable housing,” he said. ​“These guys are going to be doing more market rate. I think we need to have a conversation about this.”

Adaptive Reuse In Dwight

On Wednesday morning, Martson took this reporter on a tour of the Dwight Historic District to show just how many buildings in the neighborhood have been preserved, by individual homeowners and large developers alike.

The 20-block commercial and residential neighborhood, bounded roughly by Sherman Avenue to the west, Elm Street to the north, Park Street to the east, and George Street to the south, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

According its nomination form, the neighborhood dates back to the late 1820s when the establishment of a local branch of the carriage industry spurred the growth of wood-frame single-family and two-family homes to house a growing working class residents. As the century progressed and the city expanded westward, speculators built whole blocks of multi-family Victorian homes and then brick double houses of a more urban character, while the former Dwight Place came to house an ​“upper-class pocket” of ​“large, elaborate residences built by local, small-time industrialists.”

“Despite the construction of many five and six-story apartment buildings during the 1920s and 30s,” the NRHS description reads, ​“and a number of public housing and institutional redevelopment projects of recent decades, the scale of the Dwight area has remained residential.”

Martson started the tour at Fellowship Place, a residential and support facility for people with mental illnesses. The nonprofit’s main office is in the old Dwight co-op grocery store at 439 Elm St., built in 1925, and the campus itself spreads out across a number of restored late 19th century buildings, including the ornate late-1860s Victorian multi-family house at 276 Dwight.

“They took this land and they made it into a really nice campus” for Fellowship Place residents, she said. ​“And they didn’t tear anything down.”

Walking down Dwight Street, she pointed out the mid-19th-century, four-famoly Carpenter Gothic house that owner Scott Healy and local architectural designer, historian and entrepreneur Colin Caplan are busy restoring.

At that same corner of Dwight and Edgewood Avenue stands 203 Dwight, an early 20th-century, single-story building that used to house the Group W Bench head shop and is now a two-family residence.

At 1255 Chapel St., Martson pointed out a 19th-century three family house tucked behind the Novella. She said Stamford developer Randy Salvatore agreed to pick up and move the house onto its current lot to make way for the 2015-built apartment complex at Chapel and Howe.

“This was a vacant lot that had a fire,” Martson said. ​“This was moved as a buffer to the residential neighborhood.”

And then back up Howe Street, to the site of 95 and 97 Howe, which MOD Equities plans to demolish to make way for another new apartment complex.

“For 170 years old, it’s not doing too badly,” she said, eyeing 97 Howe’s square cupola, gabled entrance, and full porch.

“It does need work,” she said. But she’s not ready to let them be demolished without a fight.