Squatter Hotspots Demolished

Larry Brown was back in the Hill not far from the Washington Avenue house he grew up in 60 years ago. He came not to visit old haunts, but to oversee the demolition of two derelict Ward Street houses where squatters continued to live until earlier this week.

Brown, 75, works for the West Haven-based demolition contractor LGE Services LLC.

On Thursday afternoon, he sat in the driver’s seat of his flatbed pick-up truck across the street from 43 Ward St. and 47 Ward St.

Those properties used to include a two-family house and a three-family house, until Brown showed up. Now they were now filled with tangled mounds of wood, metal, and insulation.

With the help of an excavator and a small team from LGE Services, Brown helped knock down 47 Ward on Wednesday and 43 Ward on Thursday.

“In a week and a half it’ll all be gone,” Brown said as he surveyed the mess of debris where the two demolished buildings had once stood.

The two properties’ owner, Matthew Harp, pulled demolition permits in December for the boarded-up, dilapidated adjacent houses.

Last summer, neighbors raised concerns about how those long-vacant, boarded-up properties had become hot spots for squatters and drug users.

The buildings stood just a half-block away from the APT Foundation methadone clinic and across the street from the John C. Daniels Interdistrict Magnet School of International Communication. Emergency responders found a dead body under the school’s loading dock in August. Police also found drug paraphernalia, including needles, and believe the death was caused by an overdose.

Harp declined to comment on his future plans for the now all-but-cleared sites. He said that a three-family house he owns at 14 Vernon St. will also be demolished sometime in the next two weeks.

“Definitely Recently Used”

Brown said that people were still sleeping in the house at 43 Ward St. all the way up until Wednesday — the day that building was demolished.

“Yesterday I had to push out someone who was sleeping on the second floor,” he said.

Brown said he found multiple rooms filled with mattresses, blankets, and discarded clothing in both 43 Ward and 47 Ward when he did his final walk-throughs with a flashlight to make sure that the buildings were all clear to knock down.

“I walk through the rooms just to make sure,” he said. ​“I don’t have a gun or a knife. Never had one. Never will.” But he does have his flashlight, which he uses to look in each corner of each room just in case someone is still inside as a building is about to be demolished.

“At one time there had to be 15 squatters at least,” Brown said about the two Ward Street buildings.

And besides that one person he found sleeping on the second floor Wednesday morning, did the other rooms look recently used?

“Oh God yeah,” he said. ​“Definitely recently used.”

“The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly”

Brown said the demolition work he does today isn’t his only connection to the Hill. In the mid-1900s he lived and worked and went to school on these very streets.

His family moved from West Virginia to New Haven in 1959, he recalled. They lived in a house on Washington Avenue, and he went to school at the former Welch Annex School on Prince Street.

Until ninth grade, that is, when he dropped out and began a life of work.

“In my family we had nine boys and one girl,” he said, ​“All the boys worked construction.”

Which is the field he went into. He said he had made a good life for himself over the intervening decades. He served in the Army, owned his own trucking company and paving company, and worked for a slew of different construction contractors.

“I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the Hill over the past six decades, he said.

He said he’s proud of the work he’s done of the years and his various professional accomplishments.

But, he added, ​“If I had my life to do over again, I’d do it with an education.”