Oldest Main Street house owner "shocked" **updated at 2:15 Monday**

Without providing the public any opportunity to protest the decision, the city knocked down the oldest house on Main Street last week.
“It’s unbelievable. I’m in total shock,” its owner, Ken Karl, said Monday. “There’s no other word but bizarre.”
City officials and Karl have clashed for years over the slow pace of renovations on the Federal-style house at 313 Main St. which the Plymouth developer moved across the street in 2004 to save it when a library expansion project threatened it.
It appears that city building officials, who have been under pressure from politicians for years to crack down on Karl, condemned the house some weeks ago. But the records were unavailable Monday, because of the holiday, and departmental officials could not be reached.
Mayor William Stortz said the house was deemed unsafe by the city building department. "It was condemned," he said.
Stortz said Karl was given the chance to bring city officials a plan for correcting the problems.
"Apparently he didn't," said Stortz, who said Karl's overall project was "woefully inadequate."
Karl, who learned about the destruction of the house two days after it lay in ruins, said there was more than $40,000 worth of donated material inside, include high-end kitchen cabinetry, that’s apparently gone.
“That house was filled to the gills,” Karl said.
Karl said he had no idea the city had any intention of razing the building it sold to him for $1 back in 2004 when he saved it from the wrecking ball. The city had planned to knock the house down in order to have more parking for the library.
He said, though, that he received a certified letter a few weeks ago that warned him the house would be demolished if he didn’t take measures to satisfy the building department’s concerns. Karl said he didn’t take it too seriously and thought it “was really weird.”
“I just assumed they were blowing smoke again,” Karl said, because the letter offered no avenues for appeal and appeared to be so far over the top that he couldn’t imagine that it was a legitimate threat.
He said that it appears the city government operates “in an alternative universe where there is no due process” and its decisions can’t be challenged or questioned.
“This is really sad,” Karl said, calling the destruction “the Bill Stortz retirement act.”
Karl said that the current troubles began about a month and a half ago.
He said he was “just working away on the house” when building department officials stopped in and told him he needed a different building permit to keep going with the work, one for a single-family home home. A new building code had changed some rules, Karl was told, but copies of it were not available.
Karl said he got hit with a “stop work” order on the house on September 22, the same day he applied for the permits.
After that, he met a few times with city officials at City Hall and at the house. Karl said he was “jumping” for Building Official Guy Morin, but kept having new roadblocks thrown in his way.
Sometime after that, Karl said, officials raised questions about the plans he had for the steel beams holding up the house, which were new, and a back wall that had been vandalized. He said he supplied plans, but officials apparently were not satisfied with them.
Karl said, though, that he took out a mortgage on the property this year and it passed inspection for that. A structural engineer in Hartford also presented plans that showed the house was safe, he said.
He said he considered the ongoing spat with the building office “minor” because he was looking at a long-term project to restore the house “on a budget” over the course of years.
Why that plan was cut short, he said, he doesn’t understand.
Stortz said that once officials were aware of the problem, the city "had to do something.”
What happens next is unclear.
“I’m definitely not going to become a rice planter with my new empty lot,” Karl said. “I may go up there and plant some flowers.”

History of the house
The Federal-style house the city razed last week was built about 1820 by one of Bristol’s early clockmakers, researchers said.
Cheryl Barb, a Federal Hill resident with a passion for historic preservation, found that a slew of prominent Bristol residents have lived in the house over the years, including 19th century notables Titus Roberts, Elisha Brewster, Joseph Camp, David Hawley and Dr. Roswell Hawley and his widow Jane Hawley.
Roswell Hawley was a son of Joseph Roswell Hawley, a prominent Civil War general and former governor.
More recently, it was the childhood home of artist Glo Sessions.

The fate of other historic houses
2007 – A Farmington Avenue farmhouse that had stood for more than 200 years was hauled away in pieces to allow construction of a new Taco Bell.
2006 – Lake Compounce ripped down the 200-year-old homestead of Gad Norton, the founder of the nation’s oldest amusement park because it wanted to put a storage barn on the Lake Avenue site.
2002 – Two historic houses near St. Mathew’s Church in Forestville were demolished for a church complex that hasn’t yet been built.
2001 – The Bristol Housing Authority knocked down the 215-year-old Mark Lewis house on Jerome Avenue to make way for a new administrative office.


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Copyright 2007. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com