Hospital Avenue Eyesores Gone

Three dilapidated houses at the corner of Hospital Avenue and Osborne Street are now a pile of rubble, and property Owner Joseph DaSilva said the debris should be gone by the end of the week.

The houses have been vacant since before 2004, and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said he remembers hearing about them as a neighborhood eyesore in roughly 2004-2005.

“I’m glad to see some movement out there,” Boughton said. “He’s got some approvals, and I hope something replaces them expeditiously.”

DaSilva was at the site Monday checking on his excavator, which keeps overheating. He used it to tear down the three houses and he will use it to fill dump trucks with the debris. He said he hopes, depending on the excavator’s operating properly, to have the debris removed and the cellars filled in by the end of the week. One house worth of debris is already gone, and the basement is filled to ground level.

The houses were across Osborne Street from the main student garage and teacher parking lot at Western Connecticut State University.

"Removing those buildings improves the neighborhood on that side of the University," said Paul Steinmetz, interim vice president for institutional advancement at Western Connecticut State University. "We're happy that eyesore is gone."

DaSilva said the houses were too far gone to save. In one of the Osborne Street houses, a small tree had taken root inside, and it was pressing against the ceiling before it was cut down.

DaSilva has approval for 16 units on the lots. He said huge projects, like the 600 housing units of housing on Kennedy Place, take too long to accomplish. He said 16 units here or there is more likely to have a good impact on the city if the new housing developments appear continuously. He is considering another 12 units on Town Hill Avenue, and about four years ago he built new condominiums on Park Avenue. He also built condominiums between Maple and Balmforth on Osborne.

“What Danbury needs is new housing. We need new housing to attract new people downtown,” DaSilva said, speaking at the Hospital Avenue site Monday. “This is a support neighborhood for Main Street.”

Theresa Eidt Wiblishauser, a friend of Danbury Patch, wrote on Facebook, "Yeah!!! Finally!!!!"

Jimmy Pursey was less kind in his comment left on the story. "DaSilva left the dilapidated rowhouses at the top of Library Place rotting for over two decades, and only recently bulldozed them to turn half of the plot into a permit parking lot. “What Danbury needs is new housing. We need new housing to attract new people downtown.” Let's call it like it is...Joe has done NOTHING for the revitalization of Danbury except to stall it."

To understand what Pursey is talking about, check out this before and after on Library Place.