Plans Afoot To Rebuild Dixwell Plaza

The faded retail hub of the Dixwell neighborhood appears on the verge of entering the 21st century.

Details to come, and be worked out.

A subsidary of a local nonprofit has quietly begun buying portions of the hub, Dixwell Plaza, as the city looks to encourage the transformation of a 1960s-vintage brick-and-concrete island in a sea of parking-lot asphalt into a busy combination of stores, community centers, and apartments.

Dixwell Plaza occupies the blocks of Dixwell Avenue, the black community’s commercial core, between Webster and Charles streets. It has 11 contiguous storefronts in one- and two-story buildings on a 6.56-acre lot surrounded by surface parking. A condominium association with nine members owns the property.

Many of the buildings remain occupied and busy, but some not for long: Two of the anchors, the Stetson Branch Library and Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, plan to move across the street to the new Dixwell Community ​“Q” House about to begin construction.

Meanwhile, a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT) has begun negotiating with the nine separate condo owners to buy them out. It is conducting the negotiations and sales through a limited-liability corporation that it formed as a subsidiary in February. The subsidiary is called ConnCORP. (ConnCORP in turn creates LLCs to conduct each property sale.)

Earlier this year, ConnCORP purchased the 20,921-square-foot vacant former C‑Town supermarket building (pictured) for $800,000, according to city land records. (C‑Town bought it in 2006 for $250,000; it’s appraised at $994,200.)

Another ConnCORP-formed LLC purchased a 3,456-square-foot building in the plaza this month for $550,000. It houses a deli next to the now-closed Downtown Pizza and Fried Chicken restaurant.

Some tough bargaining looms with other owners.

Meanwhile, in neighborhood meetings, ConnCAT officials have hinted at some of the plans for the former C‑Town building. The organization — which runs acclaimed job-training and youth arts programs on Winchester Avenue — is apparently looking to move its culinary training school there, open a related restaurant and community center, and perhaps incorporate a video/media center.

Officials said the plans are still in flux, both for the C‑Town building as well as for the broader complex.

Meanwhile, Mayor Toni Harp, whose administration has been working for four years on ideas for reviving Dixwell Plaza, welcomed the efforts to have a single private developer remake it as a denser mixed-use complex. The city would play a major role as one of the owners of one major condo (the soon-to-be-former Stetson library space) and some of the parking areas, as well as the regulator of any needed zoning changes; the city would have some leverage over plans as it sells those properties to the developer.

“We really want the plaza to be rebuilt and be reenergized,” Harp said on her most recent appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Mayor Monday” program. ​“It really is a time when we need to reimagine it. The difficult part is there are so many owners.”

No More ​“Decaying Hand-Me-Downs”

Looking at Dixwell Plaza today, you might not think that city planners once considered its design the cutting edge of urban renewal.

In New Haven, it was.

The plaza was built in the late 1960s as part of New Haven’s broader redevelopment plan for the Dixwell neighborhood, historically the center of the city’s black community. New Haven received more federal dollars per capita than any other American city to demolish entire blocks of old homes and stores in neighborhoods throughout town and replace them with these redevelopment projects.

In Dixwell, that meant the loss of blocks worth of former stores and apartments. In their wake came a new home for the Dixwell Q House and, across the street, the retail Dixwell Plaza. (Original plans envisioned a footbridge connecting them; it was never built.)

Both structures exemplified the then-modern idea of how buildings should look and relate to their surroundings.

At the time, urban planners believed in relegating separate uses for separate parcels of land. So the social-service and recreational activities would take place at the Q. Commercial activity would take place at the plaza. Behind the plaza, people would live in the Florence Virtue Homes, one of a series of federally-insured cooperative housing complexes cropping up around town. (At least four of the coop boards have since gone under and sold to corporate owners; Florence Virtue remains.)

The greatest minds of the 1960s urban renewal also believed that declining cities like New Haven should redesign themselves to compete with suburbs for shoppers and residents and workers by making it easier to drive in and out and to park. Thus, Dixwell Plaza was built like a suburban shopping strip, with more land devoted to surface parking than to buildings or open space.

One of the smart people who celebrated Dixwell Plaza’s design was Elizabeth Mills Brown. Here’s what she wrote about it in her 1976 book, New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design:

[T]his has been a program to rebuild a neighborhood completely, wiping out the memory of the past with its decaying hand-me-downs and creating an image of a brave new world … [T]his transformation is whole enough to suggest the urban scene of the future. …

“The Plaza is the hub of the new community, pulling together shopping, institutional and cultural functions. … The design attempts a difficult balance between the need for urban definition of the street and popular modern imagery of the highway, the shopping center, and the flat suburban skyline.

Serena Neal-Sanjurjo was growing up in Florence Virtue Homes during the plaza’s heyday in the 1970s. Today she is overseeing the government’s planning for its transformation, as head of the Harp administration’s Livable City Initiative (LCI).

“It was very vibrant in the day,” Neal-Sanjurjo recalled. ​“We did everything there. We went to the doctor. We bought our groceries at the Capitol Market. Dry-cleaning. The drug store. There was a store that sold clothing — The Fair. We’d get our school clothes there. It was was a wonderful planned development.”

Before long, though the complex was also plagued by ​“drinking, vandals and litter,” as one New Haven Register headline put it. The condo owners struggled at times to keep the place up, and solvent. Every decade or so a new effort was announced to restore the plaza.

Meanwhile, the smartest minds in urban planning did a 180. They embraced a ​“new urbanism” that called for stressing cities’ strengths rather than seeking to emulate the suburbs. One that plans for pedestrians and mass transit rather than cars. One that favors dense mixtures of stores and offices and homes and community spaces over expanses of surface parking lots.

A New Vision

Dixwell Plaza needs that kind of vision now, Neal-Sanjurjo argued.

“It has outlived its useful life” in its current form, she said. ​“We need to do 21st-century development there.”

At first, she thought the city would spearhead that effort. City planners drew up sketches for possible overhauls, some involving fixing and adding to the current property, others involving razing the low-lying concrete storefronts and rebuilding from scratch. The plans envisioned a mix of apartments, possibly townhouses, with stores.

Retail is a key component, Neal-Sanjurjo said. Dixwell should again offer the wide range of goods and services that it did when she was growing up.

In 2016, the city-allied Economic Development Corporation issued this request for proposals for private developers to submit plans for rebuilding. The city also started negotiating with Dixwell Plaza owners to sell their properties. Those negotiations stalled; the RFP process fizzled. But city staff continued working on the idea.

Little did officials know that ConnCAT, a nonprofit with deep-pocket funders, was developing its own ideas for the property. ConnCAT has been part of a budding revival in Dixwell and the southern end of Newhallville. Private projects on the boards include this planned new artists’ center and this planned market-rate apartment complex to replace abandoned former factories, this residential conversion of a former funeral home, and these affordable-housing developments planned by Beulah Land Corporation.

Paul McCraven, president of ConnCORP, said the plans for the plaza ​“haven’t quite come together in a way that we’re ready to talk about them” in detail.

ConnCORP stands for ​“Connecticut Community Outreach Revitalization Program.” Click here to read a release it issued about its mission.

“We’re basically an economic development corporation looking to really focus on lower-income populations of New Haven,” McCraven said. ​“We have lots of things in the pipeline,” none of them far enough along to discuss publicly.

Neal-Sanjurjo said the Harp administration welcomes ConnCAT’s initiative at the complex. It has discussed plans for the former C‑Town with the group as well as held some discussions about the general vision for the complex, assuming ConnCAT’s ConnCORP subsidiary can succeed in obtaining all the property.

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, who also grew up visiting Dixwell Plaza daily when she visited her grandfather on Bristol Street, welcomed ConnCAT/ConnCORP’s efforts. She called them ​“another piece of bringing Dixwell back to its good old days, like with the Q House.”

“I’m excited,” Morrison said. ​“When I think of the Dixwell corridor, I think about how my dad always talked about the fact that people in the Dixwell community, you didn’t go downtown to get anything. Everything that you needed was right there in Dixwell: Your groceries, your clothing, your entertainment.”

View From The Plaza

George Clarke and Rey Harp are eager to hear details from ConnCORP and the city. What they think of those details could help determine the fate of the overall plan.

Harp is the executive director of the Greater New Haven Business & Professional Association. The GNHBPA, a black small-business advocacy group, owns one of the units and has played a central role in keeping the plaza going.

Clarke, 87, is the current president of the Plaza Condo Association. For decades he has run a second-generation family cleaning business and participated in the plaza and in GNHBPA under the longtime leadership of founder Gerald Clark.

The merchant-owners of the plaza have stabilized the finances in recent years through condo fees, according to Harp. They know change is coming. They’re not sure yet what to think about it.

“We’ve been here 50 years. We’re not going to sell unless we can stay in the development,” Harp said of the GNHBPA, which rents to numerous contractor groups and small businesses in its building. ​“We’d like to see redevelopment. But it’s got to work for everybody.”

“I think it’s good,” Clarke said of the general concept. ​“They haven’t given anyone an idea of what they’re going do. I would like to see somebody say, ​‘Here’s what the plaza is going to look like 15 years from now. I haven’t seen that.”

“They haven’t been talking to us,” said Harp (who’s the brother-in-law of the mayor).

Harp said the biggest lesson from urban renewal projects like Dixwell Plaza lies not in changing ideas about urban design, but in how officials go about drawing up and carrying out plans for neighborhoods. Planners decided, ​“We know better. This is what it needs.”

“It can’t be imposed top-down. It has to work up from the people it most affects,” Harp said of ConnCAT’s and the city’s plans for Dixwell Plaza.

“In time,” he said optimistically, ​“I’m sure it will happen.”

The plaza’s alder, Steve Winter, expressed a similar desire for the community to be more involved in the planning. He recommended that the city host planning ​“charettes,” like this one held for the redevelopment for Westville Manor.

Neal-Sanjurjo said she fully intends to share all details with the community, once she has them, at the earliest stages of planning. She has attended many neighborhood meetings in recent years to detail all the different plans on the drawing boards for Dixwell, she said. She’s banking on having more to say about Dixwell Plaza soon.

Click on the play arrow to watch the full episode of WNHH FM’s ​“Mayor Monday.”

This episode of ​“Mayor Monday” was made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem Moses P.C.