Thomas Breen photos
A ConnCAT flag newly raised above Dixwell Plaza.
Dixwell Plaza’s redevelopers raised a flag above the fraying mid-century shopping complex to celebrate gaining site control of the neighborhood-anchoring block — and to point ahead towards the strip’s pending transformation into ConnCAT Place.
Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT) President and CEO Genevive Walker joined roughly a dozen ConnCAT staffers, board members and neighborhood supporters Thursday afternoon for that flag raising ceremony at the Plaza, outside of the Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue.
That’s where ConnCORP — a for-profit subsidiary of the Science Park-based nonprofit ConnCAT — plans to build an estimated $200 million mixed-use project that is slated to include a grocery store, 150-plus apartments, an office tower, a performing arts venue, and more.
All of that remains in the future.
On Thursday, the project’s backers celebrated a different milestone for the pending redevelopment: The gaining of site control of the Dixwell Avenue block between Webster Street and Charles Street.
Over the past few years, ConnCORP has been steadily purchasing each individual commercial condo and property on that stretch of Dixwell Avenue. Late last month, they bought the last one they need to move ahead with the project.
Dixwell Plaza.
According to the city land records database, on Sept. 22, a holding company controlled by ConnCORP paid $2.7 million to Mid‑K Beauty Supplies New Haven Corp to purchase the single-unit retail storefront at 176 Dixwell Ave.
Celebrating Thursday’s flag raising.
Thursday’s small gathering and flag raising was less about ConnCORP’s purchase of Mid‑K, and more about Dixwell Plaza’s history as an anchor of a historically Black neighborhood — and about the site’s pending transformation by a local, Black-led redevelopment team.
ConnCAT President and CEO Genevive Walker.
The newly hoisted ConnCAT flag represents “our love and care for the community,” Walker said.
It represents a partnership between Stetson and ConnCORP, a celebration of the many cultural events that have taken place in and around the Dixwell library of the years, and a marker of the “revitalization” ConnCORP plans to bring to the site.
Rodney Williams and Stetson Librarian Diane Brown.
The new Q House, slated to open Oct. 30 right across the street.
“It’s a dream come true,” said Stetson Branch Library Diane Brown.
She said that the local, Black redevelopment team working to build up a part of the city that has long been an epicenter of the Black community but has suffered from disinvestment for decades represents the best of “for us, by us.”
Stetson, meanwhile, will soon be moving across the street to the new Q House community center.
ConnCAT’s Steve Driffin.
“It’s a dawn of a new era,” said ConnCAT Director of Youth Programs Steve Driffin.
This type of focused attention and investment in Dixwell Plaza has been “a long time coming. I know what this means to so many people.”
Rodney Williams scaling a ladder to plant the flag in front of Stetson Library.
And to ConnCAT Director of Adult Programs Pierre Goubourn, the flag raising was “something ceremonial, to make a dedication to this space” that he remembered as a place to get candy after church when he was growing up, and that is now slated to become a new economic hub for Dixwell and Newhallville.
“Even as a child, I realized it didn’t look like the nicer places in the city,” Goubourn said about Dixwell Plaza. He said he hopes that ConnCAT becomes “a fixture in this predominantly Black community.”