DANBURY – An overgrown former hat factory site with mercury in the soil and a vacant former county courthouse with asbestos and lead paint in its interior are the target of separate cleanup plans worth $4.2 million in state brownfield grants.
Despite the sites’ distinct histories, city leaders hope the properties have a common destiny as active players in a healthier downtown, where the economy has been languishing for decades behind Danbury’s commercial east end and its booming west side.
The former hat factory site at North Street and Barnum Court has been off the city’s radar since a devastating fire the mid-1990s, while the old Fairfield County Courthouse on south Main Street has been in the headlines as a potential new home for the city museum, and more recently as the centerpiece of a complex multiproperty redevelopment plan that turned out to be more ambitious than successful.
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“The state did not want to do that complex of a project,” said Jim Maloney, a former congressman and the architect of a plan, in an interview on Monday. “The state preferred to do it in various pieces.”
That means that instead of Danbury's plan to take control of the old courthouse and restore it as part of a larger revitalization of south Main Street and Park Place with 100 workforce apartments, the city is now focusing on negotiations to buy the 1899 national historic landmark from Connecticut for an as-yet undetermined use.
“We don’t have anything concrete that we are ready to share,” Mayor Roberto Alves said during a March 4 City Council meeting. “This building is just beautiful … and what we are committing to is keeping that beautiful structure where it is on Main Street.”
The first step, which the City Council took on March 4, is to apply for a $200,000 state grant to study the severity of the contamination in the building.
“The state had a certain amount of money they wanted for the building,” said City Council member Emile Buzaid at the March meeting. “Does that still stand or has that changed?”
“That has changed, sir,” said Farley Santos, a Democratic state representative who was answering questions as Alves’ economic and community development adviser. “We are leveraging relationships and … having conversations where the state would be conveying this property to the city of Danbury.”
“Have there been some suggestions as to potential use?” Buzaid asked.
“That has been part of the conversation we’re having. What the state wouldn’t want to see is someone put this building up for bid and build apartments in that location,” Santos said. “This would be for municipal services.”
“Are you at liberty to say what possible uses they may be?” Buzaid pressed.
“It could be for city departments, municipal services,” Santos said. “That is to be determined.”
The discussion referred to a landmark building that has been vacant for years with “significant leaks in the roof” but otherwise solid, said Antonio Iadarola, Danbury’s public works director and city engineer.
“The use of the building will dictate how much work needs to go into it,” said Iadarola, who told the City Council he was last in the building three years ago. “Overall, I didn’t see any major failing foundations or anything of that magnitude – nothing that would require a tear down and rebuild.”
But private investment in the old courthouse is out of the question, Maloney told Hearst Connecticut Media Group on Monday
“Just to make it usable as a building would be $5 million, and to restore it (to its historical integrity) would be $10 (million) to $20 million,” Maloney said. “It is not a commercially doable project.”
In contrast, on the northern-most border of Danbury’s downtown, the contaminated property on Barnum Court could be revitalized after a cleanup with construction of a new 4,000-square-foot commercial building with parking, said Taylor O’Brien, Alves’ chief of staff.
“Prior to 1950, 13 Barnum Court was home to a series of hat manufacturing operations (and) from 1950 to 1994, the site was occupied by retail businesses,” O’Brien said. “In 1994, a fire severely damaged the main building structure, leading the city to foreclose on the property due to tax delinquency and to demolish it.”
The City Council on March 4 applied for a $4 million grant to remove mercury from the site, which is bordered on the east by the Kohanza Brook.