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Maple Falls Hard
As wrecker's ball looms, preservationists try one last ploy to save Maple Cottage: buying it
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Business New Haven
7/12/1999
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Real-estate professionals are almost unanimous in their agreement that, before plunking down tens of thousands of dollars for a house, the buyer might want to see the interior.
The New Haven-based Friends of Hillhouse Avenue say they have never seen the inside of Maple Cottage, the beleaguered Trumbull Street edifice Yale University (which owns it) wants to tear down but which some area preservationists are determined to save. But that doesn't stop them from wanting to buy it from Yale and forestall the wrecker's ball.
At a June 24 press conference the Friends of Hillhouse Avenue renewed their offer to buy the structure from Yale in order to spare it. The group says it has to date raised $52,000 in an escrow account; Friends founder Anstress Farwell says a Yale-contracted appraiser valued Maple Cottage at $70,000.
The only problem is, Yale has no intention of parting with Maple Cottage at any price. The university plans to demolish the building and in its place erect a 73,000-square-foot institutional building smack in the middle of an historic district.
The university began demolition work on May 7, only to be stymied by unforeseen asbestos contamination, which caused a temporary halt to the work. In the meantime, the Friends are hoping that Yale will pull a volte face in recognition of its "special stewardship responsibility," as Peter Dobkin Hall, director of the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations and co-chair of the Grove Street Cemetery Association, put it, and sell Maple Cottage to the Friends in order to preserve "the integrity of the most important group of historic buildings in the city."
Designed in 1836 by Alexander Jackson Davis, a founder of the architectural profession in the U.S., Maple Cottage was home to feminist and author Lillie Devereaux Blake and abolitionist congressman Colin Ingersoll. As such it is part of a proposed "Millennial Trail" project celebrating the origins of the anti-slavery and civil-rights movements.
The Friends' sisyphean quest has attracted wide attention. In a June 6 letter to the Friends' Farwell, Charles M. Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge (Mass.) Historical Commission, wrote: "I am astonished that Yale still persists in this sort of thinking. At Harvard, similar behavior resulted in a community occupation of their commencement in 1970 and a gradual clearing of their senses by the mid-1980s."
Now, added Sullivan, "Given the current climate of community-Harvard relations, [Harvard] would never dare to unilaterally take down a building, much less call in their cops."
Sullivan added that, "I am astonished that you have to fight this by yourselves. Doesn't New Haven have an effective historic preservation agency?"
There's the rub. In February 1998 the president of the New Haven Preservation Trust, Edward S.K. Bottomly, entered into an agreement with Yale that permitted the latter to raze two historic buildings - Maple Cottage and the Kingsley-Blake House at 88 Trumbull Street - in return for a promise to preserve and restore four others. Critics charge that Bottomly, an interior designer, was cowed into submission by Yale and even threatened that his firm, Rosalyn Cama Interior Design Associates of New Haven, would lose university business if Bottomly played the obstructionist on Maple Cottage.
Farwell also charged that New Haven architect Robert Grzywacz, who chairs the trust's Preservation Advisory Committee and who supported the agreement with Yale, "knows nothing about preservation issues."
Bottomly dismisses the suggestion of pressure from Yale and says the entire Preservation Trust board were in agreement that the four buildings Yale agreed to preserve were more worthy of preservation than Maple Cottage.
Of the 1998 agreement between his group and the university, he adds: "For 30 years [Preservation Trust was] not in a dialogue with Yale. For the first time, they were listening to us and taking us very seriously. [As a result] we were able to turn four buildings around. We're very committed to ongoing discussions with Yale on further renovations, restorations and campus planning."
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