Most Town Workers Won’t Miss Canaan House

Photos and Story By John Voket

Depending on who you talk to, working at Canaan House was either an enjoyable adventure or a recurring nightmare. Even before the building, along with the rest of the Fairfield Hills campus, was acquired by the town last summer, the building seemed ill-fated, having experienced the back-to-back misfortunes of a major oil spill and boiler explosion. Through most of the time town employees were engaged there, many resident staffers complained the heating was either too hot or nonexistent, the bathroom facilities were temperamental, and the institutional odors inherent in the complex were barely tolerable.

In the months since Canaan House was acquired by the town, it has provided nonstop challenges to facility management personnel. Ongoing water seepage from an underground spring into the basement resulted in repetitive incidents of mold remediation. The building was only recently outfitted with a temporary central boiler, after staffers spent more than a month heating their offices with portable space heaters following the 2004 boiler explosion. Interior water leaks from upstairs lavatory fixtures may have compromised the structure. And as recently as last week, an incident of frozen pipes occurred after someone apparently turned down a thermostat, triggering a shutdown of the temporary boiler.

When the sprawling facility was occupied by town land use, planning, health, and Board of Education staff, some creative readaptation was required, including turning a public shower room into a map storage locker, framing out offices from larger common rooms, and turning resident examination rooms into makeshift copier, mail, and cafeteria areas.

This week, as occupants of Canaan House prepared to abandon the building for new town offices on Peck’s Lane, The Newtown Bee was afforded a final opportunity to capture images of both the town-occupied offices, as well as other areas of the building that still contained evidence of its former use.