Ode To Daggett Street

When I first came to Daggett Street Square in 2007, I was taken by its rambling hallways, its pulley-operated elevator. The building may not have been insulated, but it was insular. By that time, few live-work spaces remained in New Haven. There had been others — on River Street; in the Munniemaker cigar factory on State Street; at Chapel and Church, above what is now Gotham Citi — all now shut down.

Now we can add Daggett Street Square to the list: Last week officials ordered it cleared out.

Delivering coffee and donuts to Daggett tenants on Monday morning, local attorney Irving Pinsky remarked that Daggett was ​“maybe the last of its kind, and unique, in so many ways.”

Daggett Street Square was shut down last week over a long list of fire and zoning violations. For artists, that has meant the destruction of a community. The displaced from Daggett have banded together to meet basic needs, even as most of them are still scrambling to find new homes. The broader reaction among artists in New Haven has been one of grief.

It’s another loss, another anchor gone.

From Rubber Factory To Art Factory

The building at 69 – 75 Daggett St. is a 10,000 square-foot industrial space neatly sandwiched between two Yale Facilities buildings. It was initially incorporated by the Baumann Rubber Co. in 1891.

As recently as two years ago, the entire interior hallway near the loading dock and elevator shaft still had the thick smell of tires and shoe soles and erasers. The building itself had its own personality, something that left its mark on the many who lived and created there.

“I lived there on the [fourth] floor and it was very beautiful,” said visual artist and curator Martha Willette Lewis, who lived at Daggett from 1992 to 1993. ​“It had big windows — sort of like a greenhouse.… We had doors made out of the original hockey rink doors for the Whale” — Yale’s hockey rink on Sachem Street. Living at Daggett encouraged Lewis to work big, a sentiment echoed by many other artists.

Musician and composer Jonny Rodgers, who lived at Daggett from 2001 to 2005, considered it a ​“marvelous place to live and work.” He remembered that his third-floor unit had glass greenhouse ceilings that leaked when it rained. He and his housemates ​“placed houseplants strategically.” In Unit 3 – 2, Rodgers said, the space was ​“wide and light and roomy, and we could get a lot people in, so I used to rehearse large groups for my own performances there,” including ​“elements of a chamber orchestra.”

Rodgers’s roommate, David Lasala, wrote that ​“the space was very much a part of the work that came out of it. In some ways it informed the work literally, like being part of the visuals of a movie or a painting, and in other ways it was simply part of the essence.”

Despite the scale and size of individual spaces, the community itself was close-knit. ​“The Daggett community was, to my mind, a good community that had standard, understood rules and etiquette for shows and neighbor interaction,” Rodgers wrote. ​“You knew your neighbors well. I could see/hear through my bedroom floor, so neighbors had an automatic intimacy, like it or not.”

Robert James Nuzzello, Jr. first came to Daggett in 2007 and stayed until 2009. He occupied unit G‑2 with his bandmates from Fake Babies.

“It was an affordable live/work space, where we could play music at any time and volume that we wanted. And it was the only thing available like that in town that was right downtown,” Nuzzello wrote. Members of Fake Babies ​“sculpted the band” at Daggett and hosted a series of live concerts — all cleared with the local Hill North police substation at 90 Hallock St.

Indie-soul darlings the Stepkids played their first show in unit G‑2, then nicknamed The Submarine (pictured at the top of the story). As Nuzzello said, ​“the space really was the fifth member of the band.”

Artist Katro Storm lived in unit G‑2 before Fake Babies, from 2000 to 2006. He attributed his big, distinctive style to the large space and the relatively limited light it received. G‑2’s scale encouraged him to take new creative risks.

“I fell in love with the place. I think it was my most favorite studio I ever had,” he said. ​“I’d get a little magic from being in that studio.”

Storm also opened a gallery in G‑2 to exhibit others’ work and painted custom art on motorcycles. He remembers encouraging visitors to step on his canvasses while they were in progress. The work Storm made at Daggett — and the network he cultivated there — has resulted in solo shows, commissions, and the work he does today as an educator at Lincoln-Bassett.

In G‑1, where photographer Kelly Jensen (pictured) lived from 2009 to 2011, decorating became part of the daily routine. Jensen’s space was filled with salvaged items: driftwood wrapped in Christmas lights and hung from the ceiling, an indoor hammock, a clawfoot tub in the middle of the room. Jensen ​“dreamed of putting [the tub] on wheels, to do a reverse gondola thing, but never quite got around to it.”

Jensen found Daggett ​“met needs that are generally mutually exclusive: close to downtown, cheap, and big,” adding that ​“any artist, and especially younger emerging artists, need a place to work and the cheaper the better.”

Jensen left when she bought a house, but even now, she ​“feels that space loss pretty keenly.”

Other former tenants miss a spirit of collaboration. ​“It was such an inspiration sitting down at lunch every day, seeing what the others had been working on all morning, and having extra creative fuel for the afternoon’s work,” Rodgers said. ​“I crave working with other creatives around me now that I have a studio all to myself.”

Lewis, who lived at Daggett while completing her MFA in painting at Yale, noted that ​“graduate school was really hard, and not always the most joyful experience. New Haven was a very different place in the ​’90s, and it could be pretty depressing. And I felt like Daggett Street was a warm and welcoming and safe place. When I left New Haven to move back to New York, I really felt like Daggett Street was one of the good things I was leaving behind.”

For artists and art professors Phil Lique and Laura Marsh, who were kicked out of Daggett just last week, the loss is painful. They moved there because, as Marsh said, ​“paying three rents for an apartment and two studios was unbearable, and Daggett provided an affordable option we could make our own.”

They spent a year building out their unit before last week’s events unfolded. Marsh said that she feels ​“a surge of emotions, including the loss of a legendary community, confusion surrounding the value of our monies, the feeling that New Haven isn’t the most viable place for artists to thrive, and slight betrayal from the landlord.”

Marsh and Lique’s Daggett studio had previously been featured in the Independent during City-Wide Open Studios, and work that Marsh created there is currently on view at Artspace as part of its Vertical Reach show.

Arts Incubator

I left Daggett in 2013, moving in with my fiancé to a small house on Dwight Street. Like most of Daggett’s former tenants — excepting, importantly, those being forced out now — life changes pulled me away. But the foundation that was laid down there was strong. Through a combination of long hours, lean living, and luck, I took my student loans out of default, paid down other debts, and finally finished my BA. The work that I did at Daggett — and the routine and discipline I developed there — eventually led to graduate school and a teaching fellowship.

Being an artist is its own kind of labor. As Lique pointed out, ​“it is my ​‘day job.’” As a professor, Lique continuing to get teaching work hinges on his ability to continue making art. It’s also its own kind of business — and like any business, overhead features prominently.

Many of those who lived at Daggett Street have gone on to have thriving careers in the arts. They exhibit widely and play out often. In addition to their work as artists, they are educators, curators, administrators, and entrepreneurs. Many now own homes and businesses that they could afford because living at Daggett let them reduce the overhead associated with being a self-employed artist earlier.

In Lasala’s case, ​“By the end of my time there, I was working out of the loft as a web developer, teaching martial arts in one of the rooms I’d converted into a little dojo,” in addition to his work as a filmmaker and musician.

Daggett’s arrangement also allowed artists to incubate their talent along with their careers. Poet and musician Carlos Hortas has lived at Daggett since 2008 and was my across-the-hall neighbor from 2012 to 2013.

“The time I spent at Daggett allowed me to experiment and was invaluable for me to have that time and that space to do it,” Hortas said. ​“It makes me think of that essay by Virginia Woolf, ​‘A Room of One’s Own.’ The Daggett space [was] a space of your own. I remember living in other places and wanting to practice my poetry and worrying that neighbors would think I was being weird.”

Storm echoed this sentiment as well: ​“It was authentic, the real deal,” he said. ​“Whenever you watch a movie about artists, it has everything that you could imagine that someone like Basquiat might have been painting, what kind of environment he might have been from, or Picasso. It just had that ​‘it’ factor. You knew you were somewhere special when you were in that building.”

Daggett was not without its challenges. It was so cold on winter mornings that I often awoke to the sight of my own breath. The words ​“unsavory” and ​“sketchy” came up often in the course of the interviews for this piece. Drugs and crime cast a shadow on many tenures there. A few former tenants believe that the building itself made them sick.

But for those who were ready to work and in need of a place to do it, Daggett was a unique place for creative experimentation and community, and in some cases, a chance at financial stability.

Home and Midwife

That the arts community is grieving the loss of a building that was rife with code violations and criminal activity — and that such a building represented the most viable living and work solution for so many artists — says something about how artists are living in what Yale Alumni Magazine and others have declared to be Connecticut’s ​“cultural capital.”

Lewis remarked that ​“honestly, I think New Haven’s in really kind of a bad situation right now. There’s all of these luxury apartments being built and developed and one of the reasons that New Haven has the life that it has right now is because of all the artists in it, and one of the reasons why it has all of the artists in it is because of places like Daggett Street.”

“I’m sad, and tired of this,” Lique said. ​“I’m tired of my own city asking me to be creative, help develop community, and work for barely any money, and then kicking me out of the place I worked so hard to build on my own.”

Daggett was a home to many and a midwife to a lot of creative work. Its eradication is part of a longer conversation about class, art, and labor in New Haven, and about the kind of city we want to have.

As Hortas said, ​“If you want to have an arts scene, you need to give people a place to make it happen.”