A Philistine in the Shingle Museum

In spring 2006, people began phoning in tips to the HDC: Pieces of 105 Main, they said, were disappearing. When commission staffers went to take a look, they found the house had been raised on I-beams as laborers burrowed out its foundation (work for which DeSeta had a permit). The walls were also being stripped away.

The last paperwork DeSeta had submitted to the HDC concerned a request to replace the windows, but nothing suggesting such major changes to the walls. Aaron Marcavitch, a commission staffer at the time, walked across the hall from his desk at the HDC to the town’s building department, where he found a clear description of DeSeta’s project. The file indicated DeSeta had received permits from the building department to reframe the floors, walls, and roof; add insulation and “new interior finishes”; and (in language both unpunctuated and vague) to “remove existing masonry mass rebuild with new conforming stair.” DeSeta had submitted different floor plans to the building department and the HDC: the first showing the dismantling of interior walls, the second showing none at all.

DeSeta was under no obligation to volunteer information to the HDC about renovations. But commission members felt misled. “I think they already had a plan and wanted to keep us out of the loop as much as possible,” complains commission administrator Mark Voigt. “They could have given the floor plans to us and we wouldn’t have been able to say, ‘You can’t gut the interiors,’ but it would have told us how far they were planning on going.” To Voigt, it felt like a “bait-and-switch.”

The commission started paying closer attention to the project. Voigt met with architect Rex Ingram, who had taken over from BPC Architecture. (Thomas Walsh, the contractor, also cut ties with the DeSetas shortly thereafter; he cites “philosophical differences.” Walsh’s foreman, Scott Andersen, left Walsh’s employ and took on the work himself.) On May 30, the commission drafted a letter asking DeSeta to stop work on the project while he applied for approvals to complete the foundation and the new framing that appeared to the commission to raise the height of the whole house.

A week later, DeSeta—this time, with a full retinue of architect, attorney, contractor, and engineer—came again before the commission. Andersen filed an affidavit with the HDC attesting to the fact that the house’s level had not been raised; rather, he claimed at the meeting, the grade had not been properly measured before construction. Hunter, DeSeta’s lawyer, asked to move on to a review of the window request, but the commission declared it would wait another week, so that in the meantime the members could examine the house in person. Roggeveen came to that June 13 meeting with pictures he had taken on his camera phone. The images did not show an indisputable change in elevation, but even the other commissioners felt that “height was added somewhere in the process,” as the minutes of the meeting record. Without more-conclusive evidence, the commission decided it couldn’t act on the disputed foundation for yet another week.