Nine months have passed since developer Alex Anagnostopoulos got a city permit to make some minor repairs to his Wilton Avenue home, and his neighbors in Lincoln Park are still trying to figure out what happened.
The story begins in October 1990, when Anagnostopoulos bought the ramshackle two-flat on Wilton for $240,000. In November he applied for and received a permit from the Building Department to repair the rear stairwell, replace some windows, and fix the downspouts. But within a few weeks it was clear both to his neighbors and to the local community group, the Wrightwood Neighbors Conservation Association, that Anagnostopoulos was doing much more than that.
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“You hear all these horror stories about guys who abuse the building-permit process,” says Realmuto. “Let’s say someone wants to build a garage that would require a zoning variance. If he wants to avoid the hassle of a ZBA hearing, he’ll tell the Building Department, ‘I’d like a permit to fix my windows.’ They would give him a permit and that would be it. Who’s going to bother him? You see the permit and you’ll figure the project is legit. No one’s going to read the permit’s fine print. From what I hear, stuff like this happens all the time.”
“He is mistaken,” says Anagnostopoulos. “We built that addition in a week, maybe two, I can’t remember. We haven’t worked on it for five months.”
And what about your miscalculation of the side-yard dimensions?
Since then Realmuto and Anagnostopoulos have met once face-to-face to try to settle their differences. That was on July 1 in Eisendrath’s office; Anagnostopoulos, his architect, his lawyer, Buono, and Realmuto attended.
