Plans Revived For Wooster Sq. Apartments

A historic industrial building in the Wooster Square neighborhood that has sat vacant for years may soon be home to nearly two dozen new apartments and a street-level café or microbrewery.

Real estate developer Peter Chapman presented this vision for a building he owns at 433 Chapel St. during the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management team’s monthly meeting at City Hall on Tuesday night.

Chapman first bought the building at the corner of Hamilton Street — just on the other side of where I‑91 bisected the historic neighborhood into residential and industrial zones back during urban renewal — from the city in 2002 with the intention of converting the six-story brick warehouse into 14 apartments and a street-level commercial space. After years of delayed development and political troubles stymied his first attempts to rehab, and then to sell, the building, Chapman told the management team on Tuesday night, he is now on firm financial footing. He said he has a plan for the building that fits well within the city’s zoning requirements; and that he, just like everyone in the neighborhood, is eager to see it once again occupied.

433 Chapel St. was first built in the 1880s as the home of the M. Armstrong & Co. carriage manufacturing company. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (From 1986 – 1989, part of the second floor housed the newsroom of the print weekly newspaper edition of the New Haven Independent.)

Pointing to an aerial photograph of the neighborhood and a mock-up of the building’s prospective façade, Chapman said that he plans on converting the existing property into 23 apartments and a street-level commercial space like a café or a microbrewery.

The six-story building sits on a 30,000-square-foot lot, and has a 5,000-square-foot footprint. Chapman is looking to put in four two-bedroom apartments on each of the top four floors, and four one-bedroom apartments and one studio apartment on the second floor. Each of the two-bedroom apartments would be a little over 1,000 square feet, and each of the one-bedrooms would be about 700 square feet. The bottom floor would house two more apartments and a commercial space.

“I’d like to see a microbrewery or a café on the first floor,” Chapman said. ​“Something that would be a gathering spot for people in the nascent stages of the Mill River district’s development.”

Chapman said that the back lot of the building has more than enough space to meet the city’s parking regulations, and that it would also include an open space for community recreation, space for bike and scooter security, and even a few electric vehicle charging stations, if his engineers can manage it.

“It’d be really great to get this building back and full of people,” said Urban Design League president Anstress Farwell. The one concern that she raised with the proposed design was that 700-square-feet-per-apartment would be on the smaller side for comparable Wooster Square residences.

She said that a critical point in the neighborhood’s recent history came when the city denied a developer’s proposal to convert three buildings at St. Michael’s Parish into one-bedroom apartments that ranged from 375 to 440 square feet each. She said that the city’s zoning director Tom Talbot had advised against approving the project at the time because the size of the smaller units were inconsistent with the character of the Wooster Square area as a whole, where the average one bedroom is 750 square feet.

“We all strongly support that advisory support,” she said. ​“It goes to the central issue of quality of life in Wooster Square. We’re not building micro-units.”

With that one concern notwithstanding, Chapman’s designs received universal support from the group.

“We need to repurpose these old, industrial buildings,” community management team president Peter Webster said. ​“Because they’re not going to be making carriages in them anymore.”

Chapman said that, after getting input and approval from the community management team on the proposed design, he will finalize the plans for the building with the intention of presenting them to the city for approval within the next two months. He said that the only zoning relief he expects to need for this project would be to convert a second-story one bedroom into a studio. He said hopes to finish the project in 12 to 18 months.