A mime, a biker, a stripper, and a hardcore punk rocker walk into a dilapidated former clock factory.
That’s not the setup for a joke. That was just 1980s New Haven, as featured in a new documentary about the rich and bizarre history of the former New Haven Clock Company factory on Hamilton Street.
The new movie, still in production, is called Factory – 150,000 sq feet of Sex, Vice, Music, Art & Clocks and profiles the dilapidated former clock factory at 133 Hamilton St. in between Wooster Square and the Mill River.
Thomas Breen photo
Clock factory doc producer Bill Kraus and director Gorman Bechard.
Built in the 1840s as the home to the internationally renowned New Haven Clock Company, the massive abandoned building is on the cusp of being converted into 130 affordable apartments and artist lofts by Portland, Oregon-based developers who specialize in historic preservation.
Before the building is completely gutted and reborn, producer Bill Kraus and Gorman Bechard said on a recent episode of WNHH’s “Deep Focus Radio” that they wanted to shine one more bright light on this historic crumbling behemoth and on the treasure trove of stories and local characters associated with it.
The designs for the new Clock Shop Lofts.
“It’s a building of dreams and dreamers,” Bechard said about the subject of the documentary. “The building is the main character. It’s almost like the building created these little works of art in people.”
Kraus, a preservationist and real estate development consultant originally from Ridgefield, said he first encountered the clock factory building in 1999 while scouting potential artist loft redevelopment sites. Though that search ultimately led to the conversion of Bridgeport’s former Read’s department store into an artist live/work space, he stayed in touch with New Haveners associated with the former factory.
“The more I found out,” he said, “the more amazing and crazy and rewarding it was to learn more.” He started giving tours of the building, and then approached Bechard about making a documentary about its history.
“If you add up all the stories of the all the buildings from all the centuries,” he said about previous historic preservation projects he’s worked on, “the stories they have won’t equal this one.”
What Were We Thinking Films
A still from one of the clock shop parties featured in Kraus and Bechard’s new doc.
The New Haven Clock Company, founded in 1842, operated out of the building through 1960, he said. While the original wood-built oldest section of the existing building dates back to 1866, the year that the original wood-built factory burned down, he added, the clock company kept building and expanding on the factory site through 1937.
As the vacant building fell into disrepair in the late 1970s, many different artists and outcasts and underground weirdos started moving in to play music, dance, host parties, and create a vibrant underground cultural economy.
Some of the building’s tenants in the 1970s through the early 2010s included: the Bad Ass White Boys Motorcycle Club; the Club International strip club, which had a swimming pool built into its ceiling; the Brick and Wood concert venue, which hosted shows by everyone from Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson to Gwar to Run-DMC to GG Allin; skaters who built an eight-foot half pipe on the building’s top floor; a mime troupe; a 10,000 square-foot gay bar called Kurt’s, which billed itself as an “entertainment complex”; the Papier Mache Video Institute artist collective; and many more.
Markeshia Ricks photo
Dimitri Rimsky surveys remnants of Hamilton Clock Factory.
“I threw up in there in the late ‘80s” while at a hardcore punk show put on by a teenage friend soon after Bechard had finished making his low-budget slasher comedy classic, Psychos in Love, Bechard remembered.
Click here to read a previous New Haven Independent story about artists returning to the factory and reminiscing about their old haunts.
Thomas Breen photo
“These are stories that don’t typically make it into the history books,” Kraus said. They reveal not just unique individual occurrences in the factory, like the infamous Yale School of Architecture “Sex Ball,” what Kraus described as a “fancy dress bacchanalia” with a costume contest judged by none other than renowned Yale School of Architecture Dean Vincent Scully.
Gorman Bechard photo
Independent reporter Tom Breen in the WNHH studio. This photo was taken as part of a collaboration between the Independent and Artspace in anticipation of a new photography exhibition in which photographers hand over their cameras to their subjects. The photos will be shown at Artspace in late July.
These stores also reflect on the social and cultural history of New Haven, he said, as well as on more universal themes of creativity, freedom, and making visions into a reality.
“There’s so much there,” Bechard said. “Legal, illegal, everywhere in between… It sort of encompasses the underground of America in the past 40 years. It more less happened in that building.”
Go to http://ourkickstarter.com to learn more about the movie and to donate money to help Bechard and Kraus finish the project.
Click on the SoundCloud player below to listen to the full interview with Bechard and Kraus.