Staff Photo

Early-September squalor at 0 Henry Street, when the block was still owned by the Lieberman family

Back in early September, if you visited the boarded-up multi-family houses on Henry Street in Stamford's South End, you'd have thought a garbage truck had been overturned, spilling its contents at the end of this dead-end street on the Mill River.

At the end of the street was a big pile of trash. A lot, listed on city of Stamford's tax-assessors office as 0 Henry Street, was partially paved with dirty mattresses, and two Latino laborers sat in the lot dolefully, at the end of a late-summer afternoon, surrounded by crushed beer cans and other trash.

Asked where they lived, the young fellows pointed to the boarded-up multi-family unit at 3 Henry, pointed to a punched-out basement window. They were squatting in a property owned by the estate of the late Bernard Manger, whose co-executor is none other than his nephew, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman.

Lieberman, the favorite nephew of Bernard's and the junior senator from Connecticut, moved back to his hometown of Stamford earlier this year and now lives in a condo across from a school he attended as a Stamford youth. When his uncle died in 1995, Lieberman was named as co-executor of the estate with family attorney Harold Bernstein; he's paid about $25,000 a year for his trusteeship duties.

It's an easy cliché but a true one that the street had a surreal quality that day, as the lawns of the boarded-up houses had been recently mowed. While the yards were impeccably tidy, the porch at 3 Henry Street was filled with trash and dirty toys. The interiors of a number of Henry Street houses, also owned at the time by the Manger estate, were not only accessible through open or unlocked basement Bilco doors, but inside were a mess, with many signs of recent habitation of the urban-camping variety. There were piles of shit in some closets (actual shit), holes punched through walls, trashed bathrooms where copper plumbing fixtures had apparently been ripped out, graffiti, scraps of pornography, askew mattresses, overturned furniture, dirty stuffed animals, and broken glass everywhere.

The Weekly was able to gain access to several Manger-owned houses, with no effort whatsoever beyond lifting unlocked Bilco doors. (Curiously, we found fully-charged fire extinguishers at the bottom of the stairs in two of the houses.) The situation at the next-door McCall's Factory, a nineteenth-century redbrick also in the Manger portfolio at the time of our visit, was roughly equivalent in that access was as easy as the turn of a doorknob.

Here is a moment that represents a highly visible nexus point on immigration issues (let 'em squat?) and affordable housing (who needs it?) in Stamford and the county in general—and where was the senator? These solid and dowdy multi-family units are slated to be replaced with a towering office complex that will reportedly dwarf the nearby UBS building. The Manger Electric factory, the Henry Street houses, and the McCall's plant will all be razed to make way for it, pending zoning changes and an environmental review. The houses are located roughly catercorner to the Manger electric factory, and it's all a stone's throw from the Metro-North train station. It's got everything you'd want for a juicy real estate deal: location, location and location.

Facts on the ground since that September visit have changed. In late September, these properties and a slew of other Manger properties, commercial and residential, were sold as the Greenwich-based Antares sealed a deal with Manger Family Trust, through a limited liability corporation wholly owned by the Manger Trust (called Sanford Associates), to purchase these lots as part of a multi-lot deal that netted Manger's beneficiaries $17 million.

A reporter was dispatched to the site as the deal was being finalized, and observed a beehive of activity, of houses being re-boarded and the street being cleaned. And when the Weekly re-visited Henry Street on Oct. 21, all signs of squalor were gone. The trash was gone. The lot at 0 Henry was devoid of mattresses or Mexicans. A chain ran across the street with a No Trespassing sign hung from it. The Bilco doors were padlocked.

While the senator himself was not named as a beneficiary in his uncle's will—nor are any of his children, or his wife, Hadassah, according to Bernstein (he's not a beneficiary, either, he says, though he is a cousin of Lieberman's)—the deal raised questions about the wisdom of the ushering out of the remnants of Stamford's middle-class housing stock and replacing it with commercial development befitting Stamford's Trumped-up status as the "sixth borough" of New York City. As Manhattan enjoys its second gilded age, Stamford is keeping pace in its own way with the arrival of Antares, which has been buying property quickly in Fairfield County. The end of the just-plain-folks South End is part of a transformation that Lieberman, in his role as co-executor and as a senator, is entirely a part of effectuating.

(At the level of aesthetics, history and architecture, there again is an issue of the soul of a city being co-opted; Antares says it will raze the McCalls building and has said it has no plan to preserve the iconic logo that rests atop the building's partially caved roof.)

Bernstein said that news of the mess and the squatters was "a surprise," and told the Weekly that "we are ultimately responsible to maintain" the properties. "We had people there daily," he said. "We had a management company that worked continually to try and keep the properties clean and secure. I thought they did a good job, generally, though they were frustrated with the dumping and the vandalism."

Given what the Weekly observed—squatters living in at least one building and heaps of trash at the end of the block, we're certainly entitled to some skepticism about claims of "daily" visits to the site. The company hired to maintain the boarded-up buildings, Stamford-based AJM Management Company, referred questions about the frequency of their visits to Henry Street back to Bernstein.

Given Lieberman's status and influence, it's fair to ask some questions about not only the timing of the deal, but the overall context within which it was made. Even if Lieberman himself is not a beneficiary from this sale, his extended family is. And this deal was made within the same time period that the Stamford Urban Transitway plan now being implemented in the South End kicked off; that transportation-infrastructure-improvement project launched in 2003 and the senator has helped it along through his efforts in securing federal transportation earmarks.

In 2004, Stamford received $4 million for Transitway as part of that year's huge transportation bill. According to a Lieberman press release announcing, in Sept. 2006, that Stamford was to receive through his and Chris Dodd's efforts, another $7 million in federal funds for Transitway, one of the benefits would be that "[f]or the city of Stamford it carries the additional benefit of promoting community revitalization in the south end of the city, which has been left behind for too long." But is the Antares deal "community revitalization" when it replaces perfectly viable middle-class housing units with commercial towers?

Then there's the assessed value of the Manger properties, which spiked just as Transitway was being proposed. City show a huge leap in the values of all Manger-owned properties between assessments done in 2003-04 and 2006. The assessed value of that aforementioned empty lot at 0 Henry Street, for example, jumped from $98,500 to $257,470 between 2003 and 2006.

And indeed all the properties, indicating the general (that is to say, unaffordable) direction Stamford is headed, saw significant upticks in their assessed value. But, says Bernstein, "Stamford municipality did a major assessment where all property values increased substantially in the city of Stamford." In fact, Bernstein says that he "went to the assessment appeals and tried to get some of them lowered."

In filing quit-claim deeds on these properties over a two-year period in 2003 and 2004, transferring ownership from the Manger Estate to Sanford Associates LLC, it appeared as though the executors essentially sold the buildings to themselves. "It wasn't a sale to itself," maintains Bernstein. "It's just a distinction; it's easier to have it as a self-contained entity, for administrative purposes. Some of the properties, Mr. Manger owned himself. Some were owned by Manger Electric Company. The idea was to consolidate it because it was being conveyed as an assemblage."

The Weekly obtained a certificate of occupancy from 1998 for the house at 3-5 West Henry Street that listed the "owner or agent" as Sanford Associates. Bernstein explains that Bernard Manger "managed some of these properties under Sanford as a DBA; it was not an LLC at that time."

Joe Lieberman has long claimed to be a friend of the working man, a guy you could rely on to save your defense-industry job; he has enjoyed the support of middle-class average Joes and has not relinquished his good standing among many unionists in the state, who helped him win re-election in 2006 against Ned Lamont. So the problem may not be that Lieberman's heart is in the right place—but that his hands are tied when it comes to influencing the eventual use to which Antares will put its new holdings in the South End. Bernstein says that, "unfortunately, as an estate, you have responsibilities, legal responsibilities, that are distinct from those of a private owner. You have a fiduciary obligation to the estate."

In other words, as co-executor of his uncle's will, the senator was obliged to try and get the best deal possible for the beneficiaries named in Manger's will. "You have to protect the assets," says Bernstein, and the senator was proscribed from making any sort of larger policy issue out of the sale to Antares; i.e., he could not insist or demand that an affordable housing component be a part of the deal.

A review of Lieberman's most recent senate financial disclosures indicates that he is not a rich man; he is comfortably well off, to be sure, but he's no Ned Lamont. But the Manger Estate beneficiaries are $17 million richer for Lieberman's efforts as executor on their behalf.

editor@fairfieldweekly.com