The commercial building at 55 Washington Parkway in Lordship, between Marnick’s outdoor dining deck, at left, and the beginning of a tidy neighborhood, at right, has been closed since Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. The owner says now that she needs to sell the property. Greg Reilly photo.
The owner of the storm-damaged building in Lordship that used to be Skateland roller rink between Marnick’s restaurant and inn and a tidy residential neighborhood said last week that she expects to put the property up for sale.
Veronica Fellows became sad while talking about needing to sell the property that her husband bought during the 1950s.
The steel building now is missing a side panel, sections of roofing and some bricks, and it has been cited as “blight” by Stratford’s Zoning department.
The general manager of Marnick’s next door, Nick Quattone Jr., said he is good friends with the Fellows family and wishes them well, but, he said, “It hurts (his) business with the way it looks right now.”
Fellows said that her roller rink business has been closed since Tropical Storm Irene damaged the building in August 2011. Her insurance company helped her shore up some steel posts, she said, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not help, and she did not have the money to complete the necessary structural repairs.
Skateland was her only business.
Then, last October, Superstorm “Sandy made it worse,” Fellows said.
Again there was no flood insurance coverage, she said, because the damage was to the crawl space and not above the ground floor.
Fellows said she tried to use her assets and her son’s assets in order to get a small business loan, but the bank told her she could only get a loan if she had cash flow. She said if she had cash flow she would not need the loan, and she would have been able to make repairs by now.
Fellows asked Stratford Economic Development for assistance obtaining some sort of grant, but she did not qualify.
Now Fellows is trying to get her family members to help fix up the property and keep the lawn cut, so it is presentable when she talks to a real estate agent.
The commercial steel-clad structure is in a residential zone, according to Fellows and Stratford Planning and Zoning Administrator Gary Lorentson. A new owner “could try to reuse the building for another commercial use with Zoning Commission approval,” Lorentson said, “but my guess is that the building would need to be razed given its age and condition. If razed, the new use would have to be single family residential, unless they applied for a zone change to some sort of commercial.”
As the longtime owner had trouble uttering the words that she would not be returning to her business in Lordship, Fellows asked The Star to convey her thanks to her Stratford customers of many years.