Police reportedly investigating ‘suspicious’ fire
By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Historical- and preservation-minded advocates are distraught and angered this week after a fire destroyed a controversial dilapidated Neshanic house that dates back at least 200 years.
Fire destroyed the building Sunday morning. Calls came in before 7:30 a.m. and by the time that fire companies responded, it was fully aflame, said Chris Weniger, township fire marshal.
Authorities almost immediately called the fire suspicious.
The owner of the property, John Lazorchak, was away, according to employees in his landscaping business office, which is next door to the fire site on Amwell Road.
Mr. Lazorchak is also the chief of the Neshanic Fire Company, which has contracts with the township to provide primary fire-fighting in the western part of Hillsborough Township.
Mr. Lazorchak bought the property in 2005, and had been seeking for years to tear down the building and build anew. His office building plan was approved by the township Planning Board in 2007, but neighbors and preservationists appealed, saying the Planning Board didn’t know that the building was considered a part of the Neshanic Historic District.
Mr. Lazorchak sought and was denied a demolition permit in 2011. He appealed, and the Board of Adjustment decided it didn’t have a transcript or detailed testimony to consider the appeal. In January, it sent the request back to the Historic Preservation Commission to rehear the case, with orders to create a transcript this time. A new application and hearing hasn’t been filed.
Greg Gillette, chairman of the Historic Preservation Commission, was chagrined, too.
”I’m disappointed we lost a house that was so old in a historic district and whose fate was yet to be determined,” he said. “I was looking forward to resolving the issue.”
There was no electrical or heating service to the house, said Mr. Weniger. Longtime resident Lois Rivera, an opponent of demolition, said the house was last occupied in 2005.
According to one fire company website, the initial dispatch reported black smoke coming from the rear of the structure, but was updated to heavy fire visible while apparatus was responding.
Due to the condition of the building, fire crews worked to contain the fire to the original structure, according to those websites. Units cleared the scene by 11:30 a.m.
Bruce Afran, the attorney for about 15 neighbors and interested people who opposed the demolition, said his clients had been told by investigators that the fire was being looked at as arson.
”It is a tragedy that anybody would seek to destroy a house that is probably about 220 years old,” he said. “Whoever did this really did destroyed something that belongs to the community.”
He said his clients would encourage “an extremely through investigation.”
He noted the fate of the house had gone through legal proceedings and the township boards “and, after all that, for someone to take it into their own hands to destroy it is really morally wrong.”
”We have courts and public bodies to protect us from people who take actions into their own hands and engage in pointless destruction,” he said.
Ms. Rivera said her daughters, who live across Amwell Road from the site, called her about 7:30 a.m. and described the fire as it happened in front of their eyes.
She said she would have been too distraught to travel from her Ewing Township home, saying she would have been “too hysterical” in seeing decades of memories “go up in smoke.”
In addition to living in the village into adulthood, Ms. Rivera has spent considerable time researching the history of Neshanic, she said. Through her work she has learned the history not only of buildings, but of the families who lived in them, she said.
She said she has found the home belonged to Adam Bellis, a Revolutionary War patriot, and, over the years, she has hosted some descendants in her house.
”There a story to each building,” she said.
No one knows exactly when the destroyed building was built, but she ties it the Neshanic Reformed Church, the iconic center of the village, as well as the extension of Amwell Road from Woods Tavern area at the crossroads with what is today Route 206.
Around 1800, it would have been the first house a traveler would see as they came from the east into the village, Mr. Afran said.
She said the building was always “humble,” usually a home to tradesmen or “the common man.” Historians are broadening their interest from saving showpiece homes and adding places that tell how everyday people lived.
The house was also important architecturally, she said. Last year, she said it was probably the only one and one-half story, three-section home in the township.
Its value was not just in its exterior, but in its structural “bones,” she said. She said she had taken photographs that seemed to show two central columns of the house were two vertical tree trunks that had become “almost petrified” over 260 years, she said.
It wasn’t unusual in that era for people to use what they had available, bypassing the need to hew wood that would only be hidden behind framing inside and out, she said.
Mr. Lazorchak’s demolition application called the building in “very poor” condition and that “modifications and alterations to the structure dating back to the 1950s and 1960s have so altered the structure that it no longer retains any notable historic, architectural, cultural or scenic significance.”
Ms. Rivera disagreed. She said a previous owner had installed a new kitchen, heating system, flooring and windows. She said Mr. Lazorchak had done little to solidify or improve the property.
Mr. Afran and Ms. Rivera said they would monitor future usage of the lot.
Mr. Afran said he believed that size of the lot and environmental constraints would make it unlikely that a larger structure could be built, primarily because of a stream on the rear line.

