Municipal officials say the town must decide whether to invest in the upkeep of Irwin House—needed exterior work is estimated at more than $1.3 million—or knock it down.
Located in the Weed Street park of the same name, the brick Irwin House was built between 1961 and 1963 after the original 1920’s shingle-style house—once owned by IBM founder Thomas Watson, Sr.—burned down in a fire.
Town officials are looking at the cost of tearing it down, according to Public Works Director Tiger Mann.
In addressing a joint subcommittee of the Town Council and Board of Finance on Feb. 13, Mann said associated costs include an environmental review, environmental costs and the cost of demolition itself.
“We are meeting with an environmental consultant tomorrow [Feb. 14] to get their proposal and what will be the cost on the environmental side and we’re working with demolition contractors to get a budget number, so we can compare,” Mann said at the meeting, held in Town Hall and via videoconference. “And then compare what it would cost to build a similar building, possibly, there.”
Finance board member Nick Mitrakis said it would be helpful to look at the cost of demolition and rebuilding versus the repair and maintenance of the house for “a good apples-to-apples comparison.”
Mann said the $1.3 million figure would rise by $200,000 to $400,000 if interior maintenance is included.
So it would cost $1.5 million to $1.7 million “to get the building back to house people and now you are still in a residence, which is completely different from a commercial building, and it’s still not purpose-built,” Mann said.
Cristina A. Ross, a Town Council member, said the town also must figure out how Irwin House would be used, whether for office space or conference space or something else.
Irwin House, which had been used as swing space for Health and Land Use Departments during the 2013-15 renovation of Town Hall, currently leases space to the nonprofit New Canaan CARES and provides storage and meeting space for another nonprofit, the volunteer Community Emergency Response Team or ‘CERT.’
Mann said that CERT will be able to meet at the newly renovated Police Department “but New Canaan CARES has been there ever since we asked them to vacate the Playhouse to reconstruct it” and that there are “other nonprofits that are looking for space.”
Officials questioned whether New Canaan taxpayers want town funds subsidizing nonprofit office space.
Mitrakis noted that “right now you have neither.”
He continued: “You have no income and you have expenditures from maintaining and whatnot.”
Ross said that Irwin House wasn’t available to the Police Department when the renovation project started so having nonprofits in town buildings “creates a financial deficit to us.”
Reconfigure the Irwin House interior into (at least) four Affordable Housing apartments.
Imagine what could be done with the land. A series of outdoor pavilions constructed with grills nearby for families to rent for special occasions.
The structure has no material value, and very substantial costs to maintain. I would say tear it down. The park will look better without it.
I agree 100% with Eric Freeman’s comment.
On December 5, 2017 The Town of New Canaan Building Evaluation and Use Committee published its Executive Summary and Recommendations of all Town-owned buildings.
The Summary and Recommendations for the Irwin Park Main House are found on pages 68-69 of the report. At the time, Penny Young and Amy Murphy Carroll served as co-chairs on this committee.
In brief, the Irwin Park Main House has a bomb shelter and vault which are of “questionable value to the Town”.
At the time of the study, one potential use considered for this building was the relocation of the BOE. [now located at 220 Elm Street]
The report concluded: “Given the age of the structure, substantial capital improvements are anticipated including windows, roofing, HVAC, etc. ….the second floor is completely non-ADA compliant.”
I suggest that we keep the foundation, add some benches and let the Irwin Park visitors enjoy it as was done recently in Mead Park.
Here comes a petition to preserve the “New Canaan Bomb Shelter Historic Site.”
ha! ha!ha! Now that’s funny!
Make it a cafe or a restaurant. Have the restaurant operator pay for the renovations.
Many hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on the garage building which doesn’t seem to get a lot of use. Why was that the priority? When I hike at Irwin I often see the main building in use. It’s probably not well insulated. Why not get more estimates, not just from the top end restoration people? We have a sizeable percentage of buildings in Fairfield County that have old construction, I don’t see those people complaining about liveability issues. It seems the “experts” and architects have impossibly expensive demands on buildings, ever willing to squander large taxpayer money on projects when the rest of us are content with modest housing.