By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — An attempt to establish a historic district in the Sniffen Road area was quashed Tuesday night after some neighbors signed a petition objecting to designating their homes as part of the district.

The neighbors’ petition was sent to the Historic District Commission on Tuesday afternoon, and the proposal for the district was withdrawn at a commission meeting that night by Amy Zipkin, who first presented the proposal to the board Feb. 14.

Her effort to create the historic district in the neighborhood of 1950s split-level houses and raised ranches was driven by a builder’s plan to demolish the house at 30 Sniffen Road, across the street from Zipkin’s home at 31 Sniffen Road, she told the commission at the earlier meeting.

“For the foreseeable future my family will be impacted” by the demolition and construction at the site across the street, she said at Tuesday’s meeting. “I’m withdrawing the application for a local historic district for Sniffen Road … I expect the withdrawn application will remain part of the HDC file should anyone consider it in the future.”

Zipkin told the commission she was withdrawing the plan because she was finding it difficult to find enough support from contiguous property owners to agree to the proposed district. Some of houses — all built in the 1950s — had been altered and would not qualify to be in a historic district, she also said.

After the first meeting when Zipkin proposed the district along with three other property owners, she set out to get more neighbors to join the effort. 

But Don O’Day, of 8 Sniffen Road, a Representative Town Meeting member from District 3 and a former Board of Education chairman, started a neighborhood petition to oppose the historic district.

“I spoke to my neighbors and wanted to add their voice to my opposition,” he told the commission. “I got a number of people on Sniffen Road to sign within just 90 minutes.”

Another neighbor, Emily Stella, of 1 Stiffen Road, agreed with O’Day. “I do oppose the historic district,” she said at Tuesday’s meeting. “I do encourage the development of the neighborhood.”

Commission Chairman Grayson Braun reassured the neighbors that establishing a historic designation is a long process and that the commission wouldn’t — and couldn’t — have approved the proposal as soon as Tuesday.

Even if the historic district proposal had passed through the review process, two-thirds of property owners within the proposed district would have to approve it.

“We would not even start the process if there was a tremendous amount of opposition,” Braun said.

Several commission members thanked Zipkin for the detailed research she had done on the neighborhood, which included information that the development of 80 houses was called Flower Estates at Westport and the homes were built on the site of the former Fillow Flower Co. in the 1950s.

Zipkin also discovered the homes there were designed by architects Ryder, Struppmann and Neumann from New York City, a firm that won first prize in a competition called “Houses for Ten Million Families” to help families recover from the Depression with well-designed, but modest houses.

Several commission members told Zipkin at the Feb. 14 meeting that there were very few homes left in Westport in the style of the Sniffen Road neighborhood.

On Tuesday, members thanked her for helping educate them about the area’s history.

“It was a heroic effort,” commented commission member Wendy Van Wie.

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.