Thomas Breen photo
Elm City Market: Moving from 360 State to "Square 10."
(Updated) A downtown grocery store that has anchored a luxury apartment complex at Chapel and State streets for more than a decade will be closing up shop this fall — with plans to move two blocks down the road to a mixed-use development currently on the rise at the former Coliseum site.
That’s the latest with Elm City Market.
According to the grocery store’s CEO, Kurt Luttecke, Elm City Market will be leaving its long-time home at 360 State St. “around the end of October.”
But the store won’t be leaving downtown New Haven.
Instead, it will be relocating to a smaller spot just two blocks away — in the new “Square 10” redevelopment currently under construction at the site of the former Coliseum at Orange and George streets.
Luttecke said Elm City Market’s new location with be in “retail site 2a” at the southwest corner of the Coliseum redevelopment. He said they hope to reopen “towards the end of December.”
Why leave 360 State? “Ultimately, it’s too big a space for us,” Luttecke said.
He said the market will “try to retain” as many of its current 45 employees as it can over the course of this move to the Coliseum redevelopment.
Update: Frank Caico, a vice president at Spinnaker Real Estate Partners, the Norwalk-based company that is building the “Square 10” development at the former Coliseum site, told the Independent on Thursday that Elm City Market will be moving into a commercial space that is roughly 3,000 square feet.
“We’re obviously very excited to have them,” he said. “It will be a huge amenity for the neighborhood, and obviously for the Square 10 district. We were really surprised when they reached out to us. It sounds like they’re changing their business plan.”
Caico said Spinakker would love to have the market move in towards the end of December, in the outline laid out by Luttecke. He also said the first residential tenants at Square 10 should be moving in in the next few weeks, after the Labor Day holiday.
Elm City Market first opened in 2011 as a co-op on the ground floor of the landmark downtown redevelopment at 360 State. Its assets were sold at auction in 2014, when it ceased to be a co-op, but continued as a grocery store. The store has remained in that spot as hundreds upon hundreds of new apartments have opened nearby in Wooster Square, on Audubon Street, and elsewhere downtown.
Gideon Friedman, whose company Beachwold Residential purchased 360 State St. for $160 million two years ago, told the Independent that Elm City Market decided not to renew its multi-year lease, which runs out at the end of October. “They will be closing at the end of the current lease term,” at least at 360 State, he said.
Friedman praised 360 State and Elm City Market for being “valuable catalysts in Downtown New Haven’s revitalization for over a decade.” He said his company is “actively marketing the space to other operators and [is] confident that a new tenant will continue to provide services to downtown and neighboring residents.”
How does Luttecke feel about Elm City Market leaving a spot it’s called home for more than a decade? “I believe we’re going to be so closely located” to the market’s current site at 360 State, he said, that it won’t make too much of a difference.
Thomas Breen photo
Inside Elm City Market on Thursday.
