Montville — Once, these 250 acres between Route 32 and the Thames River were the hottest property in town.

In the early 2000s, a Los Angeles-based real estate investment firm began buying up the riverfront land, most of which contained decades-old homes. Several acres at a time, and millions of dollars at a time, Hackman Capital Properties bought land on the roads behind St. Bernard School from the people, banks and limited liability corporations that owned them.

In 2005, a Manhattan-based developer took over control of 246 acres for $33 million, and over the next year their vision for the properties emerged.

Tarragon Development Corp., operating through local holding companies, would build a hotel, an 18-hole golf course, luxury condominiums, upscale stores and a marina. Working with the Mohegan Tribe, whose land abuts the property, the corporation’s investors had big plans.

"The retail would be complementary to the hotel and (Mohegan Sun) casino, not a strip development," CEO William Friedman told The Day in 2006. "This is going to be a very active environment."

It never happened.

The housing market crashed, Tarragon’s various development plans across the region fell through, lenders demanded their money back, and in 2009 the company filed for bankruptcy. The project became the subject of multiple lawsuits, including one against Joel Greene and John Voloshin — the original developers to start attracting interest in the site — and another between Voloshin and Tarragon over their partnerships in projects in Montville, New London and Stonington.

Once a finalist to develop the former Norwich Hospital property in Preston, Tarragon fell off the map.

Nearly a decade later, the environment is anything but active.

A total of 37 properties along Massapeag Side Road, Derry Hill Road and Driscoll Drive sit vacant and derelict, serving as shelters for deer hunters, garbage dumps or breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

The current owners, a limited liability company that acquired the properties in 2013, have not paid property taxes since 2010 and owe nearly $1.1 million, according to town records.

The lots are also the subject of an ongoing foreclosure suit between the mortgage holders and the owners, CT Financial Partners LLC and Greene, its principal.

"They’re just sitting there," said Jerl Casey, the town’s tax collector.

Next to Bruce Wiskniewski's house on Massapeag Side Road, fairy lights still hang over the porch of a cottage, a dainty, robin's-egg blue structure that looks, faintly, like someone once lived there.

A weeping cherry tree was in full bloom in mid-April, the lawn around it overgrown. A swimming pool close to the woods behind the house had a hole plowed into it, a small puddle of brown water looking like a comfortable home for mosquito larvae.

"They told me, 'You're going to have to sell someday,'" Wisniewski said last week. A representative of Tarragon offered him a price for his home well above the assessed value, the firm’s strategy to buy homeowners' properties, in the mid-2000s, he said.

"Well, I'm still here," he said.

Wisniewski, who built his house in 1974 and lives there with his wife, is one of few neighbors who appear to have declined the deal.

People still living on the western side of Massapeag Side Road and in two pockets on Derry Hill Road and Driscoll Drive, where a dozen houses still stand vacant and falling down, say they were eager to take Tarragon’s offer.

But after the development deal fell through, they never heard back from the company or its backers, and now many of them live next door to broken windows, overgrown lawns and graffiti-covered walls.

Melanie Chopp grew up on Derry Hill Road. Her parents still live in the same house, and in the last few years since Tarragon bought their neighbor’s house they have become increasingly frustrated.

Until town staff arrived in February to board them up, the windows and doors were wide open. Deer hunters use the house as a shelter, copper pipes have been stolen out of the wall, and last spring, someone broke into her parents’ house and stole her father’s watch and cash.

The police officers who responded said the burglars likely used the abandoned home as a stakeout, then escaped into the woods behind St. Bernard School.

“That was when (my mom) was like, ‘I hate this house next door,’” Chopp said.

Later, she pointed to where someone had spray-painted the word 'eyesore,' on the house's siding.

"They were right," she said.

The town’s responsibility for the properties is limited, Montville Mayor Ronald McDaniel said. Montville’s blight ordinance does not allow police or town staff to address many of the problems with the empty properties.

So people like Ray Wehling have taken things into their own hands.

Wehling's house abuts 43 and 47 Driscoll Drive, both houses Tarragon purchased that have sat empty for years. Wehling says he mows the lawn and plows the small road off Driscoll Drive that leads to the two houses himself.

He doesn't mind the empty buildings, he said, or the small herds of deer the lawn attracts.

"It's quiet," he said. "I'd rather have no neighbors."

McDaniel said he has recently been in contact with Greene, the principal in the CT Financial Partners LLC.

Greene assured him last week that he plans on refinancing the properties and will pay the property taxes he owes.

"Vacant properties are never a good thing," McDaniel said. "I hope some sort of deal does go through."

MH Investors LLC, which holds a $2 million mortgage on the properties, filed for foreclosure last year because Greene was behind on mortgage payments. The foreclosure suit has been pending in Superior Court in New London since September 2016.

Attorneys for Greene and and MH Investors declined to comment on the suit.  

The town could also foreclose on the properties too, though despite seven years and more than $1 million in tax liens, it hasn’t.

In 2010, the Tarragon holding company Mohegan Hill Development filed an agreement to sell the land to an unknown buyer.

At the time, the land was considered an opportunity for the town to expand its economic base.

Before the sale was terminated, town officials said they were worried the Mohegan Tribe intended to purchase the property, which would allow it to file with the federal government to take the land into trust and remove it from the town’s tax rolls.

The properties are adjacent to the Mohegan Tribe reservation, and inside the 700-acre settlement area the Mohegan Tribe was granted when it was federally recognized in 1994.

The tribe, seeking to re-establish its homelands, has acquired property within that settlement area property since 1994. Tribe officials have said they plan to apply to have taken into trust any land it owns adjacent to its reservation and the Mohegan Sun casino.

A tribal official did not return a request for comment on the Tarragon properties.

Until the foreclosure suit is settled, the taxes are paid and the tribe — or another entity — buys the 250 acres by the river, Wisniewski said he plans to stay put.

"If I'm still alive, I'll cross that bridge," he said last month, looking at the foot-high grass and the empty swimming pool that have been his neighbors for the past decade.

He'd be willing to sell this time, he said, though he's not sure that will happen anytime soon.

"This used to be the best part of Montville," he said. "Now look at it. Who would buy it?"

m.shanahan@theday.com