St. Sebastian School Building Purchase

The Middletown Press reported today on the Public Works Commission discussion about a City purchase of the St. Sebastian School Building. In a motion by Councilman David Bauer and a second by Councilman Ron Klattenberg, the Public Works Commission voted to negotiate the purchase in order to provide space for the senior center.

This makes the second time that the City has discussed this purchase. The first discussion was at the April 30th, 2009 meeting of the Finance and Government Operations Committee, chaired by Ron Klattenberg.

I thought it might be of interest to dig back in the archives of The Eye for coverage of this discussion. The following photographs and text are from two articles by me, one on the monthly meeting of F&G, and a second on the history of the building (the second article corrected mistakes of history I made in the first, I have incorporated the corrections into the two extracts below).

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From April 30, 2009:

City turns down opportunity to purchase St. Sebastian School Building

The Finance and Government Operations Committee discussed the purchase of a historic school building at their meeting on Wednesday evening.

Eckersley Hall
St. Sebastian School will close at the end of this school year, a decision of the Norwich Diocese,previously reported in the Middetown Press. St. Sebastian School was founded in 1944, and occupies a building which was built in 1872 as Eckersley Hall, part of the Middletown public school system. It is on Durant Terrace, just behind Illiano's Pizza on S. Main Street. When St. Sebastian bought Eckersley Hall, the sales agreement stipulated that if the building ceased being used for education, the city would have the right of first refusal to purchase the building from St. Sebastian. Councilman Gerald Daley speculated that the city had sold the school to St. Sebastian for $1 [see correction below].

With the closing of the school, St. Sebastian has offered the building to the city for a price of $1.3 million. Planning Director Bill Warner said that all departments had contemplated possible uses for the school building, but none foresaw a benefit to the city. Councilmen Daley and Ron Klattenberg pressed Warner, but it seemed apparent that the building is too small, not handicap accessible, and in an inconvenient location for use as a senior center, city school, administration building, or any of the other possible city uses. The F&G Committee voted unanimously against purchasing the school.
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From May 1, 2009:

The St. Sebastian School Building

Eckersley Hall was built as an elementary school in 1870, to serve the children of the Durant neighborhood, which was the concentration of houses around what is now South Main Street. St. Sebastian school moved into the Eckersley Hall building in the 1980s. The Eckersley Hall School Building, which is on the Middletown Historic Properties List, was what the F&G declined to purchase (for $1.3 million) at their meeting on Wednesday evening.

Also in my article on the F&G meeting, I reported the speculation by Councilman Daley that St. Sebastian had bought their current building from the city for $1. Mayor Giuliano addressed this speculation, as well as the history of St. Sebastian School in a comment on a March 27th article in the Middletown Press about the closing of St. Sebastian. Here is all of his comment related to the school building:

No, it is not true that the City sold St. Sebastian School to the Parish for $1.00. St. Sebastian bought the former Johnson School on Green Street in the 1950s for $25,000 (back when this amount of money was actually worth something). In the 1980s, when it became obvious that the Green Street/Ferry Street neighborhood where I attended school during the 1950s and 1960s was declining, the Parish made a trade with the City. We gave them the Green Street property in exchange for the former Eckersley Hall School on Durant Terrace. Since then, the parish has made extensive improvements to the physical plant, including adding a computer lab, air conditioning, a separate annex to house the middle school, playground equipment and audio-visual amenities, among other things. This is value put into the property via the contributions of St. Sebastian's parishioners, not to mention the staggering subsidies they have contributed annually to sustain the school's operations. As I stated, once this year is over, if there is not going to be a combined regional school, the property should be marketed and the sale proceeds put in St. Sebastian's treasury. This way, the parish can repay its debts to the cemetery trust fund (from which it borrowed heavily to sustain the school) and to the Diocese, which underwrote the school's insurance obligations.