A Landmark Eyesore Finally Comes Down

By Steve Bigham

The end came quickly for Newtown’s most famous eyesore. The Texaco gas station on Church Hill Road was torn to the ground in little more than an hour last Friday morning.

 Newtown resident Dave Rosato of DGR Contracting & Demolition arrived at the scene just before 8 am and wasted little time in bringing the building to the ground. His excavator had little trouble smashing through walls and ripping apart brick. The old station offered little resistance.

“It came down pretty easy,” Mr Rosato said.

As the demolition work took place, passersby looked on with great interest. Some even stopped in for a closer look, including Randy Oberg, whose family once ran Oberg’s Service Station there until 1988 when it closed for good. Randy grabbed a brick from the scene for posterity.

The four-acre site is the property of Ernie Wiehl, who only recently agreed to allow the gas station to come down. DGR did the work at no cost, and the town was responsible for removal of the debris.

Crews from the Newtown Highway Department were on the scene for most of the morning and carted several large loads of twisted metal from the scene. An old Pepsi machine was spotted amid the rubble, as were hundreds of pieces of paper, some of them old sales slips from Oberg’s.

DGR Contracting & Demolition has done its part to remove Newtown’s eyesores – at no charge. Two years ago, DGR knocked down the former Hi-Way Cleaners building across from Blue Colony Diner, further down Church Hill Road. He also took down a large white house behind Trinity Church five years ago. Mr Rosato has been hired to do other demolition work for the town in the past.

“He’s a community-oriented guy,” Mr Rosenthal said. “He helped out a lot with the Booster Club’s concession stand at the high school football field, too.”

Mr Rosato also knocked down the old White Birch building several years ago. The former “biker bar” sat at the corner of Church Hill Road and Queen Street, in the lot adjacent to the old Texaco station. A fire destroyed the building and it sat vacant for several years until DGR took it down.

Mr Rosenthal recently proposed the creation of a blight ordinance, which, if approved, would give the town the authority to remove eyesores such as the gas station or such things as old, broken down cars from residential property. Mr Wiehl, who now lives in Florida, reportedly read an article in The Newtown Bee on the blight ordinance and decided to contact Mr Rosenthal.

“I’ve been trying to work various methods and nothing was really working. Mr Wiehl had been reluctant to do anything there because he had a couple of potential users for the site. He did not want to jeopardize that,” Mr Rosenthal said.

The first selectman said there was no word on what type of users they are.

Six years ago, Mr Wiehl was negotiating to sell the property to Big Y Shopping Center owner Joe Kasper. That deal fell through.