GUILDERLAND — The university foundation, which in January bought the nine-acre Holt-Harris property, tore the older of the site’s two houses down during the last week of April and plans to demolish the other shortly.

Mary Ellen Mallia, director of the Office for Environmental Sustainability at the University at Albany, recently told The Enterprise that one possible use currently under discussion with foundation officials is to make the property into a fieldwork research site for students in environmental science and biology.

“It’s nothing more than a notion right now,” she said, adding that the notion included the idea of building greenhouses there, for starter plants that students could then move to the heritage garden that already exists, near Indian Quad. She said that discussions had included the idea of doing permaculture there, putting in some pollinator plants, and “maybe a beehive.”

She said that she would need to visit the site to look closely at it, to see what uses might work best, but the kinds of questions she would consider included, “Could we put up some bluebird boxes? Do we want to do some butterfly waystations, or something for bats?”

“It’s a notion we are trying to more fully develop,” Mallia said. “We haven’t fully explored how we would fund it.”

This use, she said, probably wouldn’t generate much traffic, in terms of the number of students who would be visiting the site daily.

The Holt-Harris property — an oasis of undeveloped land and old-growth trees just inside the Albany city line — is bordered by Norwood Street, Waverly Place, and the university’s perimeter road.

Susan Herlands Holland, executive director of the Historic Albany Foundation, says she believes that the university foundation, as a private entity, was not obligated by Guilderland town regulations to do historical research on the property before tearing it down, but would have been obligated to do so if the site had been located in Albany, where historic preservation regulations are stricter.

“There aren’t many tight laws in Guilderland about demolition,” she said.

Donald Reeb, president of the McKownville Improvement Association, a neighborhood watchdog group that has been keeping a close eye on university intrusions into the residential neighborhood, says that the university foundation should have, for the historical record, hired a historian from the New York Office of Historic Preservation to come out and do an expert evaluation of the two homes.

Reeb says that he asked the university foundation to do so numerous times, and that he also contacted the Office of Historic Preservation; he said that staff in that office were willing to do the work, but indicated that any request would have to come from the owner.

“The university foundation would have had to have called,” said Reeb. “And they never did.”

Reeb believes that the core of the older house — which he says was added onto twice later, in the 1890s and the 1940s — may date from before the Civil War.

Asked if she thought that home was pre-Civil War, Herlands Holland said, “We have no evidence of that” and that dating the earlier house at the 1890s seemed reasonable to her.

Reeb said that he was not saying the university foundation should have restored the homes, but that they should have preserved the history by having experts come in to do a thorough assessment, “just for the history of McKownville.”

A number of years ago, Herlands Holland said, the Albany Historic Foundation sued the Fort Orange Club over the demolition of a building that dated from the 1800s, in order to expand a parking lot. That lawsuit, she said, was a catalyst for stronger rules about demolition.

Once a planned demolition is approved in the city of Albany — which is a hurdle in itself, Herlands Holland said — there are strict regulations governing how it can be done. She said that it requires careful mitigation, including reliable measurements and assessment by a reputable historic agency, photographic documentation that stays in the city, and diversion of 25 percent of the debris from landfills. Those strictures hold for all properties, whether located within a historic district or not, she said.

In the case of the Holt-Harris property, the university foundation did call in the town historian, Alice Begley, and the Historic Albany Foundation to remove any items that they wanted from the structures, “like doorknobs, fixtures, doors,” said Karl Luntta, director of media relations for the university.

“We were happy to receive that salvage,” Herlands Holland said. “The university foundation was not required to divert any of that material to salvage.”

The Enterprise asked Herlands Holland if it would be possible to photograph the stained glass windows that had been in place at the older of the two homes. These were among the materials that Herlands Holland said she had been told were “destined for the landfill” if Historic Albany did not take them.

The foundation put the windows in their not-for-profit architectural salvage store soon after removing them from the building, and they have already been sold, Herlands Holland said.

“Stained glass doesn’t last but a minute,” she said, “Some people buy it to incorporate into an older home, and others buy it to use as wall art.”

Money from the sales at the architectural salvage store go back, she said, into the Historic Albany Foundation’s work in preservation advocacy, education, and technical assistance.