NewCanaanite.com recently received the following letter(s) to the editor. Please send letters to editor@newcanaanite.com for publication here.
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Editor New Canaanite;
The “affordable” apartment complex proposed by Arnold Karp at 751 Weed Street must be stopped dead in its tracks. Located at the crest of the hill at the intersection of Elm and Weed streets, the massive five story building will tower over the western side of the town center and forever change the character of our community. It will also be very visible from Irwin Park and ruin the rural aspect of the Irwin open space. Property values in the surrounding 1-acre zone will be crushed.
Mr. Karp’s Vue apartment complex dominates the vista from town center to the south. The pre-construction artist’s renderings for the Vue showed the building to be heavily screened by mature trees planted beside the fieldstone retaining walls. When one looks south from the train station Lumberyard parking lot, there is no screening, and the Vue looms over the town above its concrete faux stone walls. The five-story residential complex planned for 751 Weed will stick out like a sore thumb, as the artist renderings unabashedly show.
The design for the proposed construction is ugly industrial with zero aesthetic charm. An approval of this design by P&Z would be a disgrace for a town that is a national architectural destination thanks to our colonial to neoclassical to Harvard Five legacy.
Most of us moved to New Canaan because of the town’s New England small-town character. Mr. Karp is working hard to transform New Canaan into another Scarsdale. I sincerely hope that the Planning & Zoning Commission will deny the 751 Weed application on multiple grounds.
Respectfully,
Skip Hobbs
100%.
He is clever to play the “people who complain about this must be big snobs who don’t support affordable housing and are therefore racist or something” card.
What a joke. As much as he tries to mask his latest desire to inflict his basic design taste on the town under the guise of being a champion for the less-rent set, the unanimous gagging sound one hears everywhere has nothing to do with price or potential tenants of his 102 proposed units.
It’s that he’s proposing 102 units. On a site where there had been one.
That’s it.
It isn’t classism. It isn’t racism. It isn’t any kind of -ism.
And it certainly isn’t NIMBYism. How can it be when he proposes getting rid of the yard altogether?
It’s people reacting the same way they would if you brought a drum set into a public library and started playing it at full volume for an hour with no sense of rhythm.
It’s rude, it’s bad manners and it’s awfully un-neighborly.
Please P&Z, stop this insanity before it starts.
Oh, and p.s., maybe we should stop selling our land to this guy?
The people of New Canaan need to stop Arnold Karp. He would like nothing better than to turn NC into a cityscape like Stamford has become. He sees large profits for his company as he strives to remove any character NC still has. Stop this madness now, it’s not to late, New Canaan has to prevail over this big money contractor ! It is all about the money and nothing else !