Looking down towards the water. As viewed from the Heights side of the Q River. A mess of furniture and cinderblocks remains exposed to the open air right alongside the the Quinnipiac River a week after a back wall collapsed at a Front Street warehouse that may soon be built up into new apart ments and retail space. The building with the debris looming over the public waterway is located at 185 Front St. The essential DFA New Haven first posted on X about the collapsed wall on Friday, March 6, and then again on Thursday, March 12. The front half of the building houses the office of Fair Haven developer Fershteh Bekhrad, who also owns the waterfront property. Bekhrad told the Independent on Thursday that she had rented out the back half of the building — with the now-collapsed wall and tumbling furniture — to a tenant who used the space strictly for storage. Bekhrad said that the wall collapsed late last week. She said that the recent winter storms, heavy winds, and the river’s water washing back and forth underneath caused the slab that had been holding up that part of the building to break. “When the slab broke,” she said, the wall found, lacking any other foundation to hold it up. On Monday, March 9, the city’s Building Department sent Bekhrad an “unsafe structure” notice indicating that an inspection of 185 Front St. on Saturday, March 7 by city Building Official Robert Dillon found the following code violations: “east side exterior wall that sits on the river sea wall has collapsed. This is a load bearing wall and needs to be stabilized or torn down.” The notice orders Bekhrad to obtain all required permits within 30 days of receipt of the letter to remedy the code violations. (In an interview Friday, Bekhrad said that the city’s notice made a mistake; this was not a load-bearing wall, she said. “Eight to 10 feet away from it,” she said, “that’s where the beam” is.) Bekhrad said she has been in touch with the city and with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) about the work needed to fix up the site. She said that she’s already engaged a contractor who will need to test the roof to see if “there’s any hazardous materials,” like asbestos, there. Ultimately, she will need to clean up the collapsed area and then close up that part of the building. She said that she will not need to demolish the building entirely in order to remedy this problem. Before any of this cleanup work can be done, she said, she and her tenant need to remove the furniture that remains stored in that part of the building. Bill Flood, a spokesperson for DEEP, that Bekhrad “was granted a Certificate of Permission to do repair work on the building in 2022.” “She contacted DEEP last week about the building collapse,” Flood said on Friday, “and confirmed she had the needed permit from 2022. Other [than] that, the building collapse is a local (municipal) issue.”  Meanwhile, Bekhrad is currently working through plans to redevelop this property and several adjacent ones into dozens of new senior apartments and 18,000 square feet of commercial space along the Quinnipiac River. The state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) has lined up a $947,500 grant to help with environmental testing and remediation to further that construction project. According to the city’s land records database, on Wednesday, DECD and Bekhrad’s company River Front Development LLC signed and filed a so-called “negative pledge and agreement” in relation to that grant. That document says that the state will provide the relevant grant to Bekhrad so long as she doesn’t sell any portion of the redevelopment property for 10 years. A separately filed “declaration of restrictive use covenant” between these same two parties adds a further condition to the state’s grant: that the property be used as mixed-income housing and retail space for at least 30 years. Developer Bekhrad: First the furniture needs to be removed, then that part of the building will be cleaned up and closed off. Credit: Alexandra Martinakova file photo The post Warehouse Wall Collapses By Q River appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less