St. Martin’s Wins Demolition Approval

A Hill faith-based middle school’s bid to knock down three derelict, historic structures and replace them with a new parking lot, a basketball court, and a publicly accessible athletic field won a key city sign-off, with the help of neighborhood support for the demolition project.

Representatives from St. Martin de Porres Academy earned that site plan approval Wednesday night during the City Plan Commission’s regular monthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

The faith-based, tuition-free nativity school plans to knock down the former convent, rectory, and garage at its 208 Columbus Ave. campus, which it moved into in 2007 and purchased from the Catholic Church in 2017.

Local architect David Thompson and a host of St. Martin representatives present Wednesday night said the school plans to keep its fifth-through-eighth-grade classes and students in the current Columbus Avenue campus school building. The school also hopes to preserve and restore the currently vacant former church building as a potential future site for school meetings, concerts, community gatherings, and theater performances.

“There’s an extraordinary financial burden” the church currently faces in keeping the late-19th century former convent and rectory, Thompson said. In the decade between when St. Martin first moved into and then bought the campus, he said, the Catholic Church shopped around the historic buildings to developers, but got little interest. When St. Martin expressed interest in buying its new school building, he said, the church gave the school an ultimatum: Either purchase the entire campus, or no deal.

That left St. Martin in a bind, he said. The school charges no tuition and gets no public financial support. It’s propped up entirely through private fundraising. While the school has been able to raise enough money each year to educate its roughly 70 students and maintain the current school building, it will need to embark on a serious capital campaign just to preserve the derelict church. The former rectory and convent, he said, would be extraordinarily costly to repair, considering holes in the roof, extensive interior water damage, and the poor condition of its masonry walls. Considering the lack of interest from developers during the decade that these buildings were on the market, he said, no other entity appears willing and able to make the investment necessary to restore these buildings.

That led the school in its recent master plan development to reach the ​“unfortunate but very real conclusion that those buildings would have to come down.”

On the face of it, the St. Martin de Porres demolition project bears a fair number of similarities to another proposed historic building take down in Dwight, where MOD Equities, the development company owned by Jacob and Josef Feldman, is looking to demolish two derelict, historic residential buildings and construct in their stead 30 new market-rate apartments.

Both proposed projects are in national historic districts, the latter in the Dwight National Register District, the former in the Trowbridge Square National Register District. That means that the interested developers have to pull a 90-day demolition permit and give neighbors three months notice before they start tearing down. But, since the projects do not fall within one of the city’s three local historic district, the city Historic District Commission has no direct power over stopping or signing off on the project.

But unlike with the Dwight demolitions, the neighborhood, based on the testimony of one of St. Martin’s representatives and by a Hill neighbor who serves on the City Plan Commission, seems to be largely in support. Neighborhood opposition has stalled the Howe Street demolitions, while neighborhood support, at least at this stage, seems to be helping the St. Martin demolitions go forward.

Thompson and Leland Torrence, a representative of St. Martin’s who testified at Wednesday night’s meeting, said that the school had held a (sparsely attended) community meeting in March about the proposed demolitions, and earned support from Hill Alders Ron Hurt and Dolores Colon as well as from the Hill South Community Management Team and the Trowbridge Square Board of Directors.

They have also met with the New Haven Preservation Trust and members of the Historic District Commission, they said. While they have received expressions of dismay that two historic structures might come down, they have not received any strong counterarguments that the buildings should instead be left standing and derelict until St. Martin’s finds the money to fix them up.

“I am a preservationist,” Torrence said, citing his past work for the New Haven Preservation Trust. ​“But I do believe that what the community wants should trump what preservation looks for.”

The one explicit source of dissent at the meeting came in the former of a letter submitted to the commission by New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell.

“The plan will have a negative impact on the historic district as a whole,” she wrote, ​“and the major public open space of the neighborhood. The integrity of Trowbridge Square is of great importance to this last and mostly intact historic neighborhood, which is still part of a majority minority community.”

City Plan Commissioner Leslie Radcliffe, who lives in the Hill and is active in the Hill South Community Management Team, rebuffed this argument before voting with all of her fellow commissioners to support the demolition project.

“The proposed use of that lot,” with an athletic field and new basketball court that will be open to the public, she said, ​“would be much more appreciated by those who live there” than the three current vacant buildings.

“Just to save a building for the sake of saving a building just because it’s old and has a history” doesn’t necessarily take into consideration the day-to-day lives of people who live and work and place in that neighborhood and currently have to put up with a sleepy streetscape towered over by vacant structures, Radcliffe argued. ​“I tend to look to the future.”

After the vote, the St. Martin’s reps said they plan to meet with the New Haven Preservation Trust one more time, but do not, as of now, plan on seeking an opinion from the Historic District Commission. They said they need to raise several million dollars to fund the demolition and construction of the athletic field and parking lot. They hope to pull that 90-day demolition permit next spring and start the demolition work by June 2020.