Third high-rise comes down on Crystal Avenue in New London
New London — There was no ceremony and no speeches early Monday morning to mark a key moment in the ongoing demolition of the Thames River Apartments.
Crews from Stamford Wrecking Co. used an excavator to topple Building C, the last of three nine-story apartment buildings that had been home to countless families since 1967.
The work to demolish the former 124-unit apartment complex for low-income families started on Feb. 9 and is expected to last several more weeks. The entire Crystal Avenue site is now covered in debris, a mix of concrete and metal. Once it's cleared, the city intends to find a tax-paying entity and a use better suited to the commercial industrial zone.
“It’s part of our past,” City Council President Efrain Dominguez, who lived with his family at the apartment complex for 19 years, said on Monday.
While the apartment complex had its share of problems through the years, Dominguez said the people who lived there will remember it as their home.
“It was a community in itself. I enjoyed my time there,” Dominguez said.
But as much as he has fond memories of playing ball in the field or the playground at the nearby Fulton Park, Dominguez said he can’t get over the location — “a residential area underneath a bridge next to a waste center.”
Mayor Michael Passero called the construction of the complex an example of failed government policy during an era of urban renewal.
Passero began work with the New London Housing Authority board of commissioners in 2016 to start the process of finding new homes for the families that lived there. Complaints about the lack of maintenance and hot water, as well as the presence of mold, cockroaches and bed bugs had reached a crescendo by the time U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accepted the Housing Authority’s application for demolition and issued vouchers for the families to move.
The last families moved out in 2018.
Passero credits work of former Housing Authority board chairwoman Betsy Gibson and the passionate work of Crystal Avenue tenants who advocated on behalf of all the residents. Passero said the demolition was long overdue.
“When I got involved and started working with HUD to relocate the people, it seemed to me that HUD was already very frustrated with the city of New London. They could not have made it clearer they no longer supported that kind of development,” Passero said. “The project we started in 2016 should have been started a decade earlier.”
The idea of demolishing the high rises was first talked about by city officials in the 1990s. A request for proposals for the property was issued in 2001, and in 2002 tenants at Thames River Apartment petitioned the city to raze the complex. One idea at the time was to pursue funding from HUD to build a series of single family homes at Bates Woods Park.
By 2006, local attorney Robert Reardon had pursued a class action lawsuit against the city and Housing Authority. By 2014, Reardon had secured a court order forcing the New London Housing Authority to rehab the complex or move the people out. Mobile housing vouchers were obtained for the residents after a failed attempt to build a more modern replacement housing complex at the site of the former Edgerton School off Colman Street.
Cleanup of the Crystal Avenue property is expected to wrap up in May.
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