For Badger property, ‘something respectful’
STAMFORD — The asking price was $850,000.
The city appraised it at $730,650.
The sale price, however, was only $500,000.
But, at least, Madonna Badger is free of 2267 Shippan Ave.
Her next-door neighbor, Steve Loeb, purchased the .34-acre lot where Badger’s 116-year-old Victorian burned on Dec. 25, 2011, killing her parents and three girls.
“I told Madonna I was going to do something respectful with the land,” Loeb said.
She didn’t seem to care. Badger is done with the scenic spot near the tip of Shippan Point, overlooking Long Island Sound.
A year ago, when she put the land on the market, her attorney said it was her last connection to Stamford, and she was eager to let it go.
A sale would bring her closer to the end of what Badger has described as a struggle to stay sane, an endurance of excruciating pain that included battles with the city over why her house was demolished without her permission the morning after it burned, preventing further investigation into the cause.
“There’s no need to interact with the city anymore,” her attorney, Frank Corso, told Hearst Connecticut Media last June.
Loeb said his plan for the lot, for now, is to preserve it. A landscaper installed plantings a few days ago, Loeb said.
“We just made it look nice,” he said.
He wants to install something else, too.
“I am planning a sculpture that will have three parts that move in the wind, one for each of the girls,” he said.
They were very nice girls, Loeb said. His son, who was 8 when they were killed, was friends with all three — Lily, 9, and 7-year-old twins Grace and Sarah.
“We knew them well,” Loeb said.
It’s been seven and a half years since fire trucks streamed down Shippan Avenue before the sun came up that Christmas Day. Firefighters found Madonna Badger on the scaffolding outside a window on the third floor of the house, which was near the end of a renovation.
She was trying to get into one of the girls’ bedrooms. She was hysterical, firefighters later said.
For years after the tragedy, the tan mailbox with white lettering that read “2267 Shippan Avenue” was visited by strangers who left notes, candles, teddy bears and rosary beads. Besides her girls, Madonna Badger lost her parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson.
Now, with the mailbox and driveway gone, and new landscaping, it will be hard for anyone who doesn’t know the spot to find it.
Loeb said there is another reason he bought the land and it’s one many Stamford residents will understand. In Shippan, as elsewhere in the city, developers buy parcels to build large homes and earn maximum profit, he said.
“There are a lot of monstrosities going up,” Loeb said. “That’s what would have happened. Nobody wants a huge house there.”
Badger’s 3,350-square-foot house had sat on the seaside site since 1895. She paid $1.7 million for it when she purchased it in December 2010, city property records show.
She was 47 and recently divorced, owner of a successful Manhattan advertising agency, and quickly undertook a renovation.
It was nearly complete when she moved the girls in that fall. Christmas 2011 was their first at the house, and her parents joined them. She had installed state-of-the-art smoke detectors, but no alarm sounded that morning.
Badger awoke choking, crawled out her bedroom window and ran along the roof of the long porch to the scaffolding. Later, when a fire marshal went to her room at Stamford Hospital, Badger told him that her friend, Michael Borcina, who also escaped, had swept up ashes from outside the fireplace and put them in a bag in the mudroom.
Badger said she saw Borcina run his hand through the ashes to make sure they were cold.
The next day, fire marshals determined fireplace ashes sparked the blaze. City officials then deemed the house a danger and tore it down without telling Badger, as the law requires, raising questions about the investigation that could never be answered because the smoldering debris was carted away and dumped.
Madonna Badger’s exhusband, the late Matthew Badger, sued on behalf of his daughters. Her brother, Wade Johnson, sued on behalf of their parents. The city settled the cases for a total of $8 million.
Madonna Badger settled for two new ordinances — one requiring that the state marshal be notified in fatal house fires, and another requiring that owners be notified before burned homes are demolished. She also got the city to install reflective markers on all fire hydrants.
It was a lot.
It may have been a factor in the land sale that started at $850,000 and ended at $500,000, said Vikktoria Cooper, a licensed Realtor with Coldwell Banker and president-elect of the Stamford Board of Realtors.
“If a seller decides they are exhausted and they just want the sale to be over, they will take an offer. A lot has to do with a seller’s wherewithal,” Cooper said. “With this property, where such a sad thing occurred, the outcome perhaps reflects the seller’s desire to get it done.”
It’s also not wise to go by city appraisals, in this case $730,650, Cooper said.
“Those are very seldom even close. It’s really about supply and demand, which has little relationship to appraisals,” she said. “The Stamford market has excellent volatility, meaning there are buyers and sellers for all types of property across most price points.”
A year after the fire, Ken Delmar, a real estate agent from Shippan, said the Badger property “probably will become a fable.” It’s not known whether that created reluctance among buyers. Loeb is the owner now. The site will be peaceful, at least for a time. Perhaps a three-winged wind sculpture will move with the breezes that blow in from Long Island Sound.
“It’s a special spot,” Loeb said, “with a beautiful view.”