Saying a neighbor’s plan to expand an antique home—coupled with plans to acquire the adjacent, long-disused Ponus Ridge Chapel and convert it into a private dwelling—would diminish home values in the area, a town woman is appealing a recent decision by the New Canaan Zoning Board of Appeals.
A rendering of the home at 394 Ponus Ridge with the proposed addition (which is around back of the house). A front porch would be rebuilt.
Elizabeth Weed in a new lawsuit is seeking to nullify a variance granted Nov. 3 to her next-door neighbors on Ponus Ridge, the Hayeses. The variance would allow them to build an addition to the rear of their home within what technically is the front yard setback—in fact, the entire ca. 1840 house is located within that setback (many 18th and 19th Century homes are situated very close to the road).
According to the lawsuit, the Hayeses’ plan for their own home runs against section 1.2 of the New Canaan Zoning Regulations, whose stated purposes include “protecting and conserving the value of land and buildings appropriate to the various zones” of the town.
The Ponus Ridge Chapel on Jan. 6, 2015. Credit: Michael Dinan
In particular, according to Weed’s complaint, the Hayeses are seeking to expand their home in the 2-acre zone while trying to create—following an earlier ZBA ruling, which has been tied up in a separate lawsuit for nearly two years—a residence out of the Ponus Ridge Chapel, which sits on a .14-acre lot.
The town’s zoning regs are designed to “safeguard home values as well as the requisite distance between neighbors,” the lawsuit says.
Together with the plan for the chapel, the ZBA’s most recent variance “undermines the neighborhood’s comprehensive plan and ultimately depreciates the neighboring home values,” the Nov. 25 lawsuit says.
Weed’s lawsuit is the third she’s filed since May 2013. Each is connected to the storied, if severely neglected and dilapidated Ponus Ridge Chapel.
Ponus Ridge Chapel—July 23, 2014. Credit: Michael Dinan
Since 1959, the chapel has belonged to The Ponus Ridge Chapel and Community Association—a nonprofit organization that formed specifically to carry out the business of the chapel.
Last year, when she became aware of an effort to transfer the chapel itself to the Hayeses (who’d pledged to restore and preserve it as a guest house), Weed, a director of the association, filed two lawsuits. Both name the Hayeses.
One says that the association’s then-president, Edythe Sherwood, and the Hayeses were “intentionally non-transparent”; that the Hayeses influenced Sherwood to “take actions that are contrary to the best interests” of the association; that all of them together “acted with the unlawful intent to deprive” the association of its sole asset, the chapel.
The second lawsuit names the ZBA, saying the town body was not authorized to permit a single-family dwelling on an undersized lot, as it did in granting a variance in May 2013.
The Hayes family filed its more recent plans to expand the home while that litigation was pending (it still is).
In a Nov. 3 letter to the ZBA and town planner, objecting to the project, Weed’s attorney—Brendan O’Rourke of New Canaan-based O’Rourke & Associates—said adequate documentation has not yet been provided to measure the impact of relocating the Hayeses’ septic system with the expansion.
Plans call for the Hayes family to abandon its current system as part of the expansion. While that’s happening, any movement on the chapel would require installation of yet another septic field on the Hayes property and near the Weed property line, O’Rourke said in the letter.
The ZBA, citing as a hardship that the Hayeses’ home predates zoning and is located so close to the road, on Nov. 3 approved the variance 5-0, meeting minutes say.
Reached by NewCanaanite.com, O’Rourke said that Brendan Hayes “has reached out individually, and we would like to try and resolve these matters and we are working toward that end.”
“The Weeds have been longtime residents of the town of New Canaan and have asked me to make every effort to resolve these matters in a fair and amicable way that results in a fair outcome for all parties,” O’Rourke said.
The Hayeses’ attorney, from Darien-based Rucci Law Group, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Part of the new lawsuit questions the ZBA’s thought in approving the variance for the Hayeses’ expansion.
“In a strange twist of logic, the ZBA actually cited the Chapel Property variance as a reason why the new Hayes variance is not inconsistent with the neighborhood plan,” the lawsuit says. “The ZBA said the Hayeses’ home being enlarged within the area of the front yard setback requirement was not inconsistent with the neighborhood plan, because the Chapel structure next door was approved as a single-family home. In so many words, the ZBA concluded that, because they already had agreed to permit a single-family home to be constructed on a grossly undersized adjacent lot and within a few feet of the road, letting another home next door expand into the mandated setback zone was of no significance.”
By doing so, the lawsuit says, the ZBA “has effectively usurped the authority of those who crafted the neighborhood zoning plan.”
“Such precedent can be used by other property owners to sidestep the setback and lot size restrictions in the neighborhood without establishing any real hardship,” it says. In granting the variance on Nov. 3, the ZBA “acted beyond its authority” and “in deviation from the intention” of the zoning regs, according to the lawsuit.
The 1,400-square-foot Ponus Ridge Chapel—which has survived at least one major fire and seen amenities added through the years, such as a modern kitchen, toilets and warm-air heating system—is falling deeper into disrepair as the lawsuits linger.
Said to have been the original location for Walter Schalk’s very first dance classes in New Canaan more than 50 years ago, the chapel in its lifetime has functioned as gathering place for important community events: church services, Sunday School, group dinners, fairs, christenings, weddings, a funeral, dancing and art classes, holiday parties and meetings of the Ladies’ Aid Society, Farm Bureau and Fish and Game League.
Cover of ‘The Ponus Ridge Chapel Memorial Program’—the Nov. 4, 1951 event marking its 40th anniversary.
According to the 1951 “Landmarks of New Canaan” book from the member-supported New Canaan Historical Society (see benefits here and applications for membership can be found here), the chapel is what ultimately came out of a movement that started in 1902 to “maintain the undenominational Christian worship of God, at or near Ponus Street.”
Weekly prayer meetings and Sunday School classes had been held in a meeting room on Davenport Ridge Road (in a building that also housed a butcher shop), according to a “Landmarks” article, by Emma Thurton.
“The members soon realized that a more adequate buildling was needed and decided to try and secure property and erect a chapel,” Thurton writes. Two neighbors—Levi S. Weed and Charles E. Hubbell—each gave a piece of property to the cause, and the chapel was dedicated on Sept. 10, 1911 “before an assembly of some 200 people.”
It would play a prominent role in New Canaan for several decades. For example, Thurton writes, when St. Luke’s School was located where New Canaan Country School now stands, Ponus Ridge Chapel “was used for religious services by the school when its [own] chapel had burned.”
The building later was redefined as a chapel-and-community-house—that triggered the creation of the association, which hasn’t met in some 20 or 30 years.
Here’s a map plotting the location of Ponus Ridge Chapel—Weed’s property is directly west of it, the Hayeses to the south: