91 Shelton Studios Smash Storage Space Sale

Mother Juniper frontwoman Lindsay Skedgell unplugged from her Vox AC15 and tuned into Zoom from a ​“vacant” ex-factory building to send developers a message: 91 Shelton is far from empty.

Skedgell was among dozens of artists who banded together to flood the City Plan Commission’s Zoom room after hearing earlier that day that their studio space, a five-story former factory building at 91 Shelton Ave., is slated for sale to a self-storage company.

The creatives learned some more surprising information during the developers’ presentation to the planning body: The place where many of them have long been building their businesses and refining their artistic output is actually just an empty cash flow hole.

At least that’s what Diamond Point Development Principal Jason Sommer was informed when he showed up to make a pitch to City Plan Commissioners to convert the building, currently owned by real estate developer Schneur Katz, into a storage facility with a community center on the side.

The 150-plus thousand square-foot building, land use attorney Carolyn Kone told commissioners, ​“is basically a vacant property” with the exception of a couple small businesses like a rock climbing gym on the first floor.

That was news to the tens of artists Zooming into the meeting from inside 91 Shelton.

“What the fuck?” Mother Juniper guitarist Dan Onorato exclaimed. ​“Yeah, we’re definitely not sitting in here right now,” Skedgell deadpanned as Kone continued to detail her client’s plans for the property. 

Considering the confusion, and the rush of public testimonies to follow, no vote was taken on whether or not to permit the pending buyers a special permit to establish a storage facility. Instead, after hours of debate, commissioners ultimately chose to continue the conversation to a Feb. 21 meeting.

On Wednesday, Kone argued that storage space is one of the only safe uses for the property. That’s because the 1916 site is contaminated from years of operating as a metals research lab by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. 

Sommer said that his team reached out to neighbors in the area to earn informal community approval for his company’s intended development. Some protested the idea of chucking a storage facility into an increasingly residential area, he said. So his crew offered a compromise by planning to keep the popular gym ​“City Climb” in place while turning an attached side building into a subsidized community center for the neighborhood.

The idea, he said, would be to sign a five-year lease with a local organization so the neighborhood could rent out community space for $1 per month, with intent to extend the agreement another five years if all goes as planned. 

“We love the idea of utilizing this old building,” Sommer said. ​“It’s environmentally tainted, it’s not being utilized at all. It’s not being utilized by the community, and it’s certainly not being used by the owner or the stakeholders of this property.” 

After meeting with the Newhallville and Dixwell Community Management Teams, Sommer continued, developers heard requests for P.O. boxes and a few offices available for rent at the property to allow for mail deliveries and small business growth. After agreeing to those terms, Sommer said, ​“we are under the impression that we’ve really, really done what we need to do with the community and that we’ve come up with a successful plan.” 

91 Shelton has long been used as a hub for artists. When Katz first bought the property in 2004, one of his first orders of operation was to hand over the site to Artspace’s City-Wide Open Studios in a tandem effort to amp up energy within the Newhallville neighborhood. 

Since then, tenants have signed on to month-to-month leases at the property. 

John Keogh, the real estate broker who spoke to the Independent on behalf of Katz, said the site has always been ​“kind of a transient situation.”

“That’s been great and it’s been going on for years. But nothing lasts forever,” Keogh said.

He said despite an evident lapse in communication with the building’s clients and potential buyers, Katz has always planned to help accommodate displaced artists at his other properties depending on whether the sale went through or not. 

Still, many artists have been working out of 91 Shelton since Olin Corporation sold the property to Katz. 

“If you just stepped inside this building you would have heard music,” Musician Clancy Emmanuel told developers Wednesday.

Though the elevator is often broken, the lights in the long stairway flicker on and mostly off, and tenants have resigned themselves to likely asbestos exposure, everyone who spoke to the Independent Wednesday emphasized their gratitude for 91 Shelton — given how few alternative spaces exist for artists locally. 

Kennies Earl, for example, has spent his after-work hours over the past 13 years developing a multi-tiered creative space to support artists, organizers, and others from around the state.

“I’ve invested so much and to not be considered part of the equation is like… wow,” he said during Wednesday’s public hearing. ​“This is the first time anyone’s hearing about this.”

He estimated that he’s invested over $100,000 into the space over the last decade. He currently rents four rooms, which house a photography studio, recording room, and videography space. 

Though the bathrooms stink and Earl said the haunted atmosphere of decay has turned some potential clients away, ​“Kennies Earl Kreative House” — decked out with expensive equipment, built-out stages, and complex lighting configurations — reads as a string of separate universes defined by care and professionalism. 

While Mother Juniper alternated between practicing an upcoming setlist for a Saturday gig at Never Ending Books and hunching around a common cell phone running the City Plan meeting, Earl was tuned in next door alongside two of his regular clients: Scott X Esdaile, president of the Connecticut NAACP, and Rai’Jona Crear, a model, actress, and photographer. 

“For them to say the building is empty is just ridiculous,” Esdaile said. ​“Black people have always been treated invisible.”

“You will not treat him as invisible,” he said, gesturing towards Earl, ​“because he’s an asset to this community.”

He described Newhallville as the ​“Harlem of New Haven.” 

Other artists repeated that stance in various ways over the course of the night. New Haven is a cultural capital, testifiers repeated, but 91 Shelton is virtually the only studio space available in the area. 

The City Plan meeting shed light on fears not just from long-term residents of Newhallville and Dixwell regarding the gentrification of their neighborhoods coinciding with the development of Science Park; but from working artists concerning the complexities of finding accessible spaces to practice, perform, and produce without traveling hours after clocking out to do so.

Earl, for example, is the exclusive media partner for the state NAACP. He offers his space to people like Crear, who travels from Bridgeport to shoot short films at Shelton. He still works eight hours a day with a nonprofit disability services provider in New Haven to make ends meet. 

One artist who identified himself as ​“D,” meanwhile, told commissioners on Wednesday that 70 percent of his monthly income comes from the art he makes inside Earl’s studios. 

Rebecca Moore, program director for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, asked point blank: ​“Why not use this building to build affordable studio spaces for artists?”

The Arts Council offers studio hours for artists, she said, and has already completed 828 reservations since opening in April of 2022. 

“When speaking to artists, space is the number one thing needed in this city,” she said.

Newhallville does not have a ​“library or cultural center to call home,” so why not establish 91 Shelton for that purpose and ​“magnify the neighborhood and cultural center as a whole?”

Beyond the artists renting rooms inside Shelton, several community members and city officials attended the hearing to oppose the plan. They expressed disappointment that they had not heard of the storage space proposal until it came up on Wednesday’s agenda.

More than 60 individuals signed a petition rejecting the prospect of storage space, asserting that such a development would hurt adjacent property values, create light pollution and generate traffic in the area while disrupting an increasingly residential community.

City Climate Director and former ward 21 Alder Steve Winter was one neighbor who spoke up.

“The operation of a self-storage facility directly across the street from these homes is incompatible with a largely residential area,” he said. 

While an environmental land use restriction indeed prohibits housing development, there are several alternative possibilities that wouldn’t require demolishing the building, he said. Including the currently active uses on scene like artist studios and business offices.

“There’s no life in a self-storage facility, and it does not contribute to the revitalization of the area,” he said. Who is to say, he warned, that the community space baked into Diamond’s site plan won’t die out after the temporary lease is terminated?

Erin Denst, the co-owner of City Climb, shared that even she was unaware of the pending sale. ​“Even though we were lucky enough to hear that we were not being impacted. I can’t imagine being in the shoes of the other people and businesses who were caught off guard about this,” she said. ​“At the gym we hear the music and we see the life in the building.” 

Only a few who had been consulted about the project prior to Wednesday’s meeting offered support for the development. The supporters included Chanelle Goldson and Kim Harris, leaders with the Newhallville Community Management Team. 

Goldson, a landlord, argued there is genuine need for a localized storage facility. ​“A lot of my residents have come from hotels to our properties,” she said. ​“They had to discard their belongings in the process because they didn’t have anywhere to store them close by.”

Harris said the project could indeed bring ​“vitality” to Newhallville, because a community center would ​“help to enrich the culture, the history and innovation of who we are.” 

Plus, she said, she’d like a P.O. box at the site herself: ​“Lots of my packages have forgotten stolen over time… it would be an opportunity for mail pickup.”

Harris complimented Diamond Point Development for their engagement. 

“It was a stretch for them to come to the meetings and talk, and we are just really grateful for that. They came to us first,” Harris said. ​“That’s not a common thing that happens in Newhallville.”

“We’re not trying to hide anything from anyone,” Sommer pleaded to the crowd following the public hearing. ​“I’m sorry the way this news was broken to the current tenants. … We want this to be a community space in perpetuity.” 

What next?

Issues like traffic and impact on property values are likely negligible, commissioners reflected. But, as Commission Chair Ernest Pagan said, ​“if there are small businesses in there, and people are feeding their families out of there, in my mind that’s critical.”

Kone concluded that while the developers now ​“understand there’s this vibrant cultural life at the property,” it’s still a ​“severely underperforming model” and the ​“building can’t financially stand the way it is right now.”

At one point, the developers asked commissioners whether they would approve the storage facility if they also promised to set aside studio space for any artists with current leases. There are estimated to be 22 artists with active leases, though many more utilize those rentals. 

Commissioner Adam Marchand warned against that plan. The legality and safety of the artists’ presence in Shelton, he and others said, remain unclear to the city.

“I am heartened by the developers’ willingness to meet with tenants,” he responded. ​“I’ll feel much better once that conversation is more advanced and the legality of them being there verified.” 

At the end of the night, Earl and other artists, like EZ Bluez of the band Shame Penguin, signed off of Zoom and meandered into Mother Juniper’s two-year-old studio.

The small room, a ​“concrete box” upon move-in, according to the band, is now surrounded by homemade fiberglass acoustic paneling, dripped with warm string lights, and covered in a collage of vibrant carpets. 

Other than recording and writing, ​“you have to understand this is a sacred place where people can get together and hang out for four a half hours,” Bluez said, ripping a weed vaporizer. 

Band practice was over for the night — but a new pack of storage space cynics had taken the stage.