News

Three Residential Demolitions In New Canaan, Including Storied Carter Street Home

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A demolition permit was issued March 10 for a 1926-bulit Colonial at 85 Carter St., a house that had been steeped in New Canaan tradition as the longtime, multi-generational Karl family home. The 1926-built home had been sitting on a 2.75-acre parcel in the 2-acre zone and has been razed, though no new building application for re-developing the parcel has appeared at the New Canaan Building Department. ***

The town on has issued a permit to demolish a house on a 2.27-acre Country Club Road property that saw new construction go up less than two years ago. UPDATE: A resident with knowledge of this property said the home that underwent demolition is a smaller Colonial located behind the new construction, visible from further east rather than head-on down the driveway. V&A Value Construction in May 2014 received a permit from the town to build a new, 7,690-square-foot home at 90 Country Club Road and, according to the Assessor’s database, that new 2-story Colonial had been the only structure on the property.

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Faith, Family and Fierce on the Court: Rose Kelley Karl

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[This is the second installment in a four-part series “Matriarchs of Main & Elm,” profiling the women behind New Canaan’s great business families.]

New Canaan’s Sara Schubert can remember walking through the woods as an 8-year-old girl to visit her grandmother, Rose Karl, at the Carter Street home that the family had built in 1926—the same year Rose’s own father, Henry Kelley, laid the cornerstone at the “new” New Canaan High School, now the police department. There, the woman whose leadership, wisdom and commitment to loved ones would make an indelible mark on an iconic New Canaan business and family, greeted young Sara with freshly baked cookies, milk and—characteristically—meaningful conversation. “I knew I wanted to be a school teacher, get married someday and have kids, and Grandma always told me that it should happen in that order,” Sara recalled on a recent afternoon. “She also told me to have a backup plan in case computers took over a teacher’s job, and this was back in the ‘70s. She was always so insightful, grounded and forward-thinking.”

One of 15 children born at the turn of the century to the prominent Kelley family of Carter Street, Rose would marry Leo Karl, Sr. at St.