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Essex Preparing Nomination for Federal Recognition as Historic Place

Essex recently received a $20,000 grant from the State Historic Preservation Office that will help with the necessary research, documentation, and general preparation of a nomination for Essex Village to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).

The town scheduled its first information session on the project on Oct. 27, with additional sessions planned to take place prior to submitting the nomination, which Consulting Planner John Guszkowski anticipates will be March of 2022.

The focus of the nomination will be on the architectural heritage and history of several buildings in Essex Village.

“There are dozens of historic homes up and down Main Street and Pratt Street and a little bit of North Main Street that are of the Colonial era and retain a great deal of that history and character,” said Guszkowski.

The town has hired Kristen Noble Keegan of Bywater Historical Services, LLC, as the project’s historic architectural consultant.

“She’ll be doing individual property files for each of what’s called contributing properties, and then she will be working to basically create a map of contiguous properties that all are in the district and contributing,” Guszkowski said, adding that contiguous properties are a requirement for qualifying as a district.

Keegan will build on prior efforts that date back to the late 1970s to document and survey the historical buildings of Essex Village for state and national registers.

“Obviously a lot of things have changed in the last 40 years and so the documentation needs to be updated and all of that, but there is some legwork that had been done already,” said Guszkowski.

A high-level survey of all three villages that was completed about 10 years ago, Guszkowski said, formed the basis for Ivoryton’s nomination to the NRHP, which was granted in 2014.

“Ivoryton was added to the national register something like six or seven years ago,” he said. “There hasn’t been any noticeable change in anyone’s life as a result. It’s a pretty low-impact, honorary thing.”

Asked what the designation would mean for property owners in Essex Village, Guszkowski said that in addition to being honorary, “it does open up the possibility that rehabilitation assistance could be provided through historic tax credits, historic rehabilitation tax credits.”

Owners of historic registered properties may take a 20 percent federal income tax credit for the costs of rehabilitation, according to the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD).

Other benefits include qualifying owners of historic properties for federal and state grants for preservation activities, protecting these properties from “unreasonable destruction under Connecticut state law” and potentially offering alternatives to safety code compliance, according to the state DECD’s web site.

The only restriction for property owners relates to demolition delays.

“This wouldn’t stop you from changing the color, making an addition, changing the windows, renovating the house; this designation would not do that,” said Guszkowski.

“But if you’re looking to take down entirely a building that was within the historic district, the National Register of Historic Places district, there would be almost certainly some delay of demolition required in order for historic documentation to take place before it disappeared forever,” he continued.

The nomination does not require a referendum or town vote, according to Guszkowski.