- May 30, 2026
- Darren Tobia
Plainfield’s Abbott Manor has become synonymous with legal trouble. William Michelson, vice chair of the township’s Historic Preservation Commission, admits that he winces whenever the property changes hands.
“When a new owner comes on the scene, we want to know what does this mean, what’s going to happen?” Michelson said.
This year, the home’s new owner, Zhong Gui Wang, met with the township’s Historic Preservation Commission to discuss the possibility of renovating the home into a bed and breakfast. Although no official plans have been presented, this was certainly a welcome departure from previous proposals.
“That is exactly what we want and it’s a permitted use in the historic district,” said Michelson, who is Preservation New Jersey board member.
The Abbott Manor at 810 Central Avenue in Plainfield. Photo Courtesy of Darren Tobia.
The Abbott Manor is a contributing building to the Van Wyck Brooks Historic District, which was listed on the National Register in 1985. Built in 1890, it has belonged to notable residents including the Van Buren family, relatives of the eighth president of the United States, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman, considered the nation’s first female cryptanalyst. But it is not these prominent residents where the home gets its name.
In 1953, two sisters, Doris and Alice Abbott, bought the home to open their namesake nursing home. But the residential historic district wasn’t zoned for a nursing home.
In 1955, the Abbott sisters, took the town government to court in order to get a variance to operate the nursing home. It operated quietly as a small, 20-bed convalescent home. Even when it grew to 35 beds with a rear addition, theAbbott Manor coexisted peacefully with the neighborhood.
But in 2002, the facility, under a new owner, a gerontologist named Robert Lapid, began to struggle financially.
Lapid devised building a three-story, state-of-the-art nursing home next to the home that would have tripled the size of the facility.
“It would have involved cars and even ambulances going in and out of what should be a quiet residential street,” Michelson said.
The battle to save Plainfield’s Abbott Manor isn’t just about preserving an important historic building. It is about enforcing the zoning laws in the Van Wyck Brooks Historic District. Michelson, a lawyer who represented the neighborhood association in court, and won the case in appeals in 2007.
“The ruling was the first time a New Jersey court has declared the validity and importance of historic districts, and described what their effect should be on land-use applications,” Michelson told the New York Times.
The neighborhood was still not in the clear. In 2012, Andre Yates bought the home with the hope of turning it into a 25-unit rooming house for military veterans. But the plan sought a staggering 38 variances, including one for an apartment building which isn’t permitted in the historic district. He lost the case in district court in 2019.
Built in the 1890s, the Abbott Manor is from a time when one wealthy family could maintain such a grand Victorian home, usually with the help of servants. But that sort of wealth is not so common anymore.
The two previous owners sought to breathe new life into the property by bending the rules to a breaking point. The Abbott Manor — which made Preservation New Jersey’s most endangered list last year — has now fended off two proposals that would have drastically altered the property.
However, now the concerns about the manor are of a different sort — what will happen if the property remains empty for much longer?
“The worst case scenario is the structure is so deteriorated that nobody is going to put money into it and it has to be torn down,” said William Edmunds, one of the founders of Save the Queen City, a preservation group that monitors endangered landmarks in Plainfield.
