Tax Watch probe finds lack of permits at Yorktown's sprawling Fieldstone Manor
A month ago, Yorktown developer Bill Catucci was bullish about his Yorktown subdivision at the site of the historic Field Mansion and its WWII watchtower on Strawberry Road.
In addition to 14 single-family homes to be built nearby, Catucci was working on transforming the mansion, built in 1935 for William Field and his wife from the Vanderbilt family, into a sprawling complex with seven apartments and an event space for weddings, corporate meetings and political fundraisers.
He called it The Mansion at Fieldstone Manor.
The apartments, with vaulted ceilings and brass banisters on the staircase leading up the flats, were all leased, fueled by the huge demand for rentals in northern Westchester.
The event space had promise, too.
Yorktown Town Supervisor Tom Diana, with whom Catucci is close, hosted a campaign fundraiser there in the spring. The newly installed town leader, along with "his team and guests flooded The Mansion with new and old connections, laughter as well as new beginnings," according to the venue's website blog. A happy couple’s wedding celebration in a tent off the grand living space was a success this summer. And Yorktown Republicans gathered there on the evening of Nov. 7 for their election night victory party.
“I’ve lived in the mansion for 15 years with myself and my family,” said Catucci. “I wasn’t using all the rooms, so I felt like it would be nice to let people enjoy the big spaces where you could have parties, anniversaries, and weddings. It would be nice for people who don’t get to use a mansion that often, or see a mansion like this.”
He said there was plenty of room.
"When you get 100 people in here, it's really not a big deal," he said.
But days after Tax Watch alerted the town's Building Department about Catucci's use of the mansion, the event space had crashed, and his apartment rental business was derailed. That came as my investigation discovered that Catucci lacked essential town approvals for the ventures.
The probe found:
The mansion is located on a parcel zoned solely for housing, which precludes commercial uses, such as an event space, without a special permit.
The apartments lacked certificates of occupancy and electrical permits.
The project's approval required that Catucci create two affordable units, but he had no plans to do so, with the town's Community Housing Board unaware that the affordable units were in the pipline.
Town issues notice of violation
When contacted Monday about the lack of approvals, Catucci said he had dropped his plans for the event space. However, the mansion's website advertising its availability remained live, seeking customers for weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, bachelorette parties or a holiday bash for your company's employees.
He also said that he had told his tenants they needed to move out so he could upgrade the electric system that serves the apartments. One tenant had told Tax Watch in early November that the electricity went out often.
By Wednesday, the town inspected the units, finding no life or safety issues. However, it issued a notice of violation, requiring Catucci to obtain certificates of occupancy for the apartments, said town spokesman Geoff Thompson.
Catucci had maintained that he didn't need to obtain certificates of occupancy because tenants had lived there before he renovated the apartments.
“There have been 10 different families living there for the past 20 years,” he said.
Catucci said he asked his tenants to leave the apartments by the end of December so he can upgrade the mansion’s electrical system, with permits he plans to obtain from the town of Yorktown.
“Now that everyone is moving out, we are going to modernize and bring it up to code,” said Catucci. “We are waiting for Con Edison. Once we start doing the upgrades, then we’ll pull the permits we need.”
Catucci said the event business he'd touted wasn’t going to work out at the mansion.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t make any money doing it,” Catucci said. “In order to make it the real deal, I’d have to invest so much, and I don’t really want to. It would take a full-time business, so that’s why I’m not going to be going further with that.”
To create an event space there, Thompson said, Catucci would need to obtain a special permit, which may be granted, as long as the event venue was not primarily a commercial operation.
"It may fit under that section, but would need to be evaluated on its merits," Thompson said.
Close ties to town supervisor
The abrupt turnaround on Strawberry Road is the latest twist in the history of the mansion. It was built in grand fashion in 1935 at the site of the former Westfield Farm, alongside its three-story tower, which was used by the U.S. civil defense network during World War II to look for German war planes.
After the Fields moved out, they donated the mansion and its surrounding lands to an entity tied to the Roman Catholic Church that founded a school for girls called Ladycliff Academy. The nuns that taught there lived upstairs in the mansion, and they dined downstairs in its cafeteria, down the hall from an indoor shooting range. The parochial school's priest lived in the tower.
The school subsequently went co-ed in the early 1970s with the founding of Franciscan Hall, a parochial high school that operated until 1991.
Catucci, who grew up in Yorktown’s Mohegan Lake hamlet, graduated from Franciscan. He bought his old high school's property about 15 years ago. For much of the time, he has lived at the mansion while working on the subdivision. Three homes are under construction and Catucci said he has sold three more lots to builders.
His company’s spokeswoman, Tara Kiely, said Catucci has close to ties to Supervisor Diana, a former Yorktown police officer who was first elected to the Yorktown Town Board in 2015.
“We are very close to them, extremely close to them,” Kiely said.
Former Town Supervisor Susan Siegel, who attended most every Planning Board meeting from 2012 to 2020, said she was surprised when a neighbor told her she’d been to a wedding at the mansion. Siegel found the mansion's website and began digging through her detailed planning board notes, which had no mention of an event space in the mansion.
“In early November, he was hyping the wonderful event space, but after you started looking into it, and found his approved plan didn’t call for that, he changed his mind,” she told Tax Watch. “There is slack enforcement for a lot of things in Yorktown."
Affordable housing at the mansion
When Catucci obtained approvals for his project in 2016, the town’s Planning Board gave the green light for 14 homes and seven apartments. The approval required the development come under the town’s affordable housing law, with 10% of the units set aside as affordable under town guidelines. That meant two of the 21 units were to be affordable.
Three months later, the Yorktown Town Board rescinded the affordable housing ordinance, at the urging of then-Supervisor Michael Grace, who argued it was an unfair tax on developers. Catucci said Grace subsequently told him that the rescinding of the ordinance meant he no longer had to provide affordable units.
“He told me: ‘You aren’t going to have to do that,’“ said Catucci.
The town’s Planning Department, however, had determined that developments approved with the requirement for affordable units still have to provide them.
"The requirement is still a component of his site plan approval, which has not been amended," Thompson said. "The set-aside law repeal did not, as a matter of law, abrogate the requirement."
Ken Belfer, who chairs the town’s Community Housing Board, said the two units, approved eight years ago, weren't on his radar. He was glad they were back in play. Catucci was renting his one-bedroom apartments for $2,000 a month. The maximum rent for an affordable one-bedroom is $1,376, Belfer said.
"This is a pleasant surprise," Belfer said. "Affordable apartments are desperately needed in Yorktown."
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David McKay Wilson writes about tax issues and government accountability. Follow him on Twitter @davidmckay415 or email him at dwilson3@lohud.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Tax Watch probe finds lack of permits at Yorktown's Fieldstone Manor
