Middletown business owner Mark Massiro was alerted by his teenage daughter one morning that his collision center and used car business located on Newfield Street was on Tik Tok.
An account with over 5,000 followers had posted a video of the dilapidated, crumbling house that sits next door to Massiro Enterprises with the caption: “If you’ve ever wondered what Connecticut was like… this is our car dealership,” complete with haunting music in the background. The video showed his business sign and vehicles for sale alongside the house and had almost 1,000 likes.
It was not the type of advertising Massiro, nor likely the other businesses situated in the business park next to 790 Newfield Street in Middletown were looking for, and Massiro says he has been trying in vain for four years to get City of Middletown officials to do anything about the property next door.
“The town just did nothing about it,” Massiro said. “We complained nonstop. They either didn’t respond to us, or they’d say they were dealing with the property owner. It’s brutal. You can’t see the cars out front for sale. People drive in and they’re like, ‘is that place haunted?’ This is what we have to deal with because the town can’t enforce code.”
Massiro estimates he’s lodged roughly twenty complaints about the property with the City of Middletown over the years for blight or fire code violations, and yet nothing has substantially changed about the situation.
To add insult to injury, when Massiro put out a small “used cars” banner near the road, he immediately received a notice from the city telling him it “violated code” and Massiro would be fined if he didn’t remove it, according to an email Massiro sent to Ashley Prezas of Middletown’s building division.
While the house was sitting in disrepair, the city has been using it for fire and police training, while assuring Massiro that they will tear down the structure when they finish.
“Two weeks they were here. I had fire trucks over my cars; I had to move my cars out of the way. We agreed to it; we let them do it. The town is telling me the place is going to be knocked down in two weeks, I expect it to be knocked down in two weeks. That was four months ago,” Massiro said. “Another few weeks go by, and the police come. They’re doing flash bombs in there, shaking our building.”
Middletown property records show John Pappas of Garden City, New York still owns the 4.2-acre property, which he bought in 2008 for $1.5 million and was appraised for $647,000 by the city in 2024. Pappas could not be reached for comment.
According to city zoning minutes and news reports, the entire property was meant to be converted into a mixed residential and commercial development in 2019, but since the approvals were made by the city and tax abatements awarded to the developers, nothing has happened. Reached for comment, one of the proposed developers said the project was being pursued by Pappas, but that it “fell through the cracks,” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, the property has been left vacant and overgrown, and the house has been crumbling, with shingles and pieces of brick occasionally blowing off the roof and onto the cars Massiro has outside for sale. Massiro says that, at one point, tire thieves hid in the long grass, which is over five feet tall, and removed all the tires from one of his cars.
Reached for comment, Middletown’s Blight and Zoning Officer Thomas Hazel confirmed that police and fire have been using the building and said that no blight fines or citations were issued to the owner because it is scheduled for demolition once the utility company makes the final disconnections.
“This house is set for demolition,” Hazel wrote in an email. “It is being held up by the utility companies and it is not fast enough for the neighbor. The town has trained fire and police on the property which is typical, and the City is waiting on the final disconnection of the utilities to issue the demo permit.”
Middletown Building officials did not respond to request for comment.
“We have to do business with this, struggle to bring people in here because of the appearance of what’s next to our building. We’ve got ten other businesses here. It’s a whole complex,” Massiro said. “You pay taxes, taxes, taxes and the people in town do nothing for you.”
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That strip of Newfield Street looks like a garbage dump. And I find it absolutely disgusting that the city is not doing anything about it. I think he should put out his sign on the road and the city needs to suck it up. because unless they’re going to do something about all these properties that are falling apart on Newfield Street, a sign isn’t the end of the world.
Your absolutely right. And their should be more funding for the town to get rid of a garbage dump of a building. Middletown is a dump. I can sum it up in this phrase. Weak minds talk about each other. Middle-class bitch and moan. And real minds talk about ideas to change what’s not right. And the fact that it has been ignored so long is incompetent. What would you expect from mentaltown.
Oh the sign is up and it’s staying up. 3 months later and the place is still a disaster