Brian Manor

The Brian Manor, a 28-unit apartment building, was built in the second half of 1924 and probably completed in early 1925 by owner Louis Resnikoff.

The brick apartment building was built to house 24 family apartments, 8 on each of three floors. The building is a total 7,407 square feet on a 16,538 square foot lot. On the 75’ wide by 220’-6” deep lot, the building is set back 25’ from the right-of-way, 67’ from the rear property line, and 11’ from the west property line. The apartment is built right up to the eastern property line, and provides a recessed light-well for windows to apartments on that side. The total footprint is 64’ x 130’. The apartment is built with concrete footings over gravel, but has a stone-masonry foundation wall. A steel superstructure of 4 ½” x 5” “Lally Patent” columns forms a 9’-0” square grid. The exterior wall is solid masonry of 12” to 16” deep, and the interior partitions are unspecified but likely of stick construction. The estimated cost of the project at the time of the permit was $100,000.

The building was built in the second half of 1924 and probably completed in early 1925 by owner Louis Resnikoff, who applied for a building permit on July 14, 1924. The designers are New Haven architects Brown & Von Beren, who mostly did work on Prospect Hill.



Shortly after the building opened a second permit was submitted on March 18th, 1925, to build a carriage house in the back of the lot for a price of $800.00. In 1998 a permit was filed for its demolition for an unspecified cost, by current owner Don Lord, who lives off the premises in Southport, Connecticut. Its value, however, was listed at $5,250.The next permit on record is from April 4th, 1946, when then owner Jacob Witkin planned to alter a single apartment unit for $400, possibly suggesting he may have lived there. On January 12, 1952, Witkin applied to “convert one basement apartment into living rooms for two families,” which may explain, however unclearly, when and how the number of apartment units grew to 28, which is otherwise first reflected in a 1987 building inspection that describes Brian Manor as a “28-unit apartment.” According to permits on file in the New Haven Hall of Records, there was a fire in unit 2B sometime in mid-2007. Three permits were filed to repair the damage, one to install new sheetrock, tenant separations, and smoke detectors for a cost of $8,000, filed on October 12th, an electrical permit filed on November 6th, and a plumbing permit filed on March 24th, 2008.

It was the first, and to date the only, apartment building to be built on its block of consistently detached, large, single-family houses. Nevertheless its differing typology was not at all out of scale or out of context. Even while containing 24 units, it’s height of three-stories was consistent with the rest of the block, and the quaint, country-like Tudor bays on the front of the building match the suburban residential character that surrounds it. Furthermore, it is just one house away from the soaring stone masonry towers of the Plymouth Congregational Church, which would have been an institution in the neighborhood for many years, its construction dating back to the 1880s. The color and texture of the brick reinforce the urban setting of the church and fits the scale of its parish hall around the corner; however it does decisively box in the back-yard of the Victorian house in-between the church and the apartment. To date Brian Manor is the only property that was redeveloped as multi-family housing. Instead, the rest of the block became absorbed by growing sphere of influence of Saint Raphael Hospital across the street, changing use from residences to doctors’ offices and other support facilities. In the face of these changes, however, it has maintained its use as an apartment house.



The most important changes Brian Manor are not so much in its internal history but in its settings. Indeed, while the history of Brian Manor has been remarkably steady and consistent considering all of the massive changes across the street in the development of Saint Raphael Hospital. According to Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, in 1901 the south side of Chapel Street was of entirely residential housing stock, most likely in the surrounding Victorian style. At that time a different hospital occupied one of these houses, Grace Hospital, which was down the block to the west at 1418 Chapel Street. The next map, from just before when Brian Manor was built in 1924, the opposite side of the street was occupied by the New Haven Normal School of Gymnastics across several converted Victorian houses. Saint Raphael Hospital occupied only a single deep building directly across the street from Brian Manor, at the address 1442 Chapel Street. It was neighbored then, to the west, by the much larger Grace Hospital, which, like the gymnastics school, occupied several converted buildings across many sites. The next available map in 1973 shows a radical transformation in that block. No single building remained from 1924, and the entire block had been consolidated into a single property under Saint Raphael Hospital. The plans show the beginnings of the organism that is current, built-up, dense complex, though in 1973 much of the Chapel Street frontage is un-built and used as surface parking. Since that last mapping, almost all houses along Chapel Street in that area have been converted to doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and other facilities relating to the now major hospital. The residential program of Brian Manor, however, has remained virtually unaffected by all of these changes.

The 28-unit apartment building was designed in a Tudor Revival style.