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February 23, 2005
For Plaintiffs, It's A Matter Of Principle
Property Owners Say Fort Trumbull Roots At Heart Of The Matter
By TED MANN
Day Staff Writer
Published on 2/23/2005
Washington— They looked tired but satisfied, this group of New Londoners standing Tuesday on the steps of the nation's highest court, as one by one they were pulled before the cameras and microphones, asked to say once more what it was they were fighting for.
“We wanted to keep our homes,” Susette Kelo said quietly.
The case of Kelo v. New London is about reinvigorating a sagging municipality, about taxes, about the right to own and control personal property free from government's grasp.
But for the property owners and their families who wouldn't sell, who chose to fight, and who traveled down to the capital through rain and snow to see that fight to the last, there is something more.
At its heart, they said Tuesday, this is still about the grapevines in the Cristofaros' back yard, about Matt Dery's parents not having to move out of their home in the twilight of life, about Susette Kelo's little pink house on the hill above the harbor.
John and Michael Cristofaro say they had a good reason to fight the New London Development Corp.'s attempt to take their parents' house: They had been through this once before.
Pasquale and Margherita Cristofaro's home on Woodbridge Street, off Howard Street in Shaw's Cove, was taken by eminent domain in the 1970s, their two sons said, to make way for a seawall they never saw constructed.
The family moved to Goshen Street, and one family member or another has stayed there ever since, even as their neighborhood, once again, was torn down.
“We just didn't know what we were seeing the first time around,” said John Cristofaro, the youngest of five, who describes himself as “the shy one.”
He stood in a crowd of reporters, lawyers and fellow property owners on the plaza in front of the court minutes after lawyers from both sides had made their arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“They also said that was a rundown community, too, and you see what they've done,” Cristofaro said of the site of his family's earlier home, where a complex of medical office buildings now sits. “They put in all commercial and got rid of the residential.”
As he spoke, an attorney from the nonprofit Institute for Justice, which has represented the property owners in this case, pulled his brother, Michael, away to talk to CNN.
Later, as attorneys for the Institute for Justice were just starting to round up their clients for a post-argument gathering at the firm's headquarters, Michael Cristofaro and his wife, Anna, stood hand-in-hand at the plaza's edge, flushed and smiling.
“We're doing really good,” Michael said.
Even the prospect of waiting until June for a decision from the court did not seem to bother them. “We've been waiting seven years,” said Anna. “What's a few more months?”
Though no one wanted to guess what the justices might think, some on the property owners' side seemed elated at the tone of the arguments, particularly what seemed to be skeptical questioning of the city's attorney, Wesley W. Horton, by Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Was the other lawyer on our side too?” Kelo asked with a smile as the crowd poured out the front doors of the court after the arguments.
As the lead plaintiff, whose name is on the court filings and whose tidy, pink house on East Street is perhaps the most identifiable symbol of resistance to the city's plans, Kelo smiled as she was thrust before the cameras and microphones outside the hearing, but confessed that the attention was sometimes a lot to bear.
“I'm a little overwhelmed,” she said.
Meanwhile, the friends and families were starting to show the strain; some had not eaten, and most had waited in line since the early morning to get seats in the court chambers.
But they were encouraged, they said, that the message they had sought to send had at last been heard by the highest court.
They are not holding out for more money, said Dery, the home-delivery sales manager at The Day, whose octogenarian parents, Charles and Wilhelmina, want to stay in the house where Wilhelmina was born.
“They don't want to wake up rich tomorrow,” he said. “They just want to wake up tomorrow, where they live.”
© The Day Publishing Co., 2005
Posted by lumi at February 23, 2005 10:19 AM