Secret ​“Factory” Life Exposed, Preserved

Clocks. The Sex Ball. A punk club, then an R&B club. An indoor skate park. The state’s largest LGBTQ club.

All of these are part of the past of the old New Haven Clock Company building on Hamilton Street.

In the present day, that factory complex is being cleaned up in preparation for development into housing, some of which is to include housing for artists. The reason for that concept — and the deeper history of artistic life in New Haven — is brought to sparkling, fascinating life in “Factory,” an exhibit that celebrated its opening on Friday and will run at the New Haven Museum on Whitney Avenue until Aug. 29.

As the accompanying text written by Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, curator of the exhibit and director of photo archives at the New Haven Museum, argues — in the case of the Hamilton Street factory complex, quite persuasively — ​“a building is like a kaleidoscope, seen as one thing from the outside and a blend of texture and visions on the inside. The history of the clock factory offers a view into a counterculture, which operated on the fringe, hidden in plain view.” It also offers a context for, and suggests some pointed questions about, the site’s current development plans as New Haven continues to experience a boom in housing construction while touting its place as the cultural capital of the state.

Tick Tock

Before the factory’s heady, arty afterlife, it was a place that churned out clocks. The New Haven Clock Company began as the Jerome Manufacturing Company in the 1830s. It moved to Hamilton Street in 1842. As the exhibit’s text relates, ​“it was the first factory to produce well-made inexpensive brass clock movements in America. for over a century, the New Haven Clock Company was a worldwide known brand, and the bedrock of a growing neighborhood. Employees were German, Polish, Swedish, Russian and Italian. Over 1,500 men, women and children, and generations of families, made the timepieces that were the high-tech commodities of their day.”

The first part of the factory building as it currently exists was built in 1866, and the complex kept getting added to through 1937. But after World War II, the company began to decline. Mismanagement plagued its transition from wartime to commercial production. ​“By the late 1950s the company was barely solvent but still revered as the pillar of a soon to be displaced community,” the exhibit’s notes relate.

The business was still potent enough for its buildings to escape being demolished in 1958, when New Haven’s plans for the urban renewal of Wooster Square were enacted. But just a few years later, ​“the company quickly and quietly shut down.” The owners first started renting parts of the complex to other companies in textiles and light industry, and eventually sold the buildings. In 1966 one of the buildings was knocked down to make way for I‑91. As the exhibit relates, ​“by 1970, the immediate neighborhood had been leveled and replaced with light industrial warehouses and vast parking lots. The Case Works building was now known as the Hamilton Street Industrial Center. The remainder of the clock factory complex was disconnected from downtown, the community and its own past.”

But what a future was in store.

Rock ​‘N’ Roll

These silkscreens may not look like much, but in the context of the exhibit, they’re an important piece of archeology — the ​“earliest evidence found of artists working and possibly living in the old factory space” in the 1970s, as the exhibit notes say — even as the entire area, with the exception of Farnam Courts, was no longer zoned for residential use.

Whatever hidden working and living was going on there, in time it became more public. There was the Papier Mache Video Institute (PMVI), which was founded in 1978 by Paul Rutkovsky, who was ​“a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for the Study of the Avant-Garde” (which, sadly, no longer seems to exist). PMVI ​“was a group that focused on activist art of a transient nature not typically found in museums and galleries. They took on issues of feminism, war, capitalism, elitism, urban renewal, and ​‘TV monoculture’ with works of music, dance, poetry, visual art, performance, mixed media, and of course papier-mache and video.” TVs were smashed. Videos were made. There was an annual Miss America event in which women and men competed.

As the notes relate, ​“Rutkovsky and crew established their work and exhibition space on the wide-open fourth floor of the north side of the factory. They had open reign to create freely and host events, gradually spreading and taking over space along the west side (Hamilton Street) as well…. When Rutkovsky became a professor at Florida State University, colleague Beverly Richey took over and did groundbreaking work in feminist art and the subject of food as a political statement.” A one-day-only exhibition in 1984, entitled ​“1984,” ​“had a crowd of over 700 visitors lining up around the block.”

In another part of the factory complex, a troupe of mimes called the Petaleurs, with a leader named Dimitri Rimsky, created lofts to live and work in together, installing gas, electric, and plumbing lines. With owner Tony Yagovane charging minimal rent, ​“the Petaleurs were ubiquitous in the 1980s New Haven restaurant and club scene, and selling roses for $1 apiece to customers often made their entire month’s rent in one night of work…. They salvaged materials from throughout the factory and dumpsters across the city, creating beautiful lofts with all the hidden comforts of home.” They also rigged up a security system for the essentially insecure factory, including fake doorknobs, hidden locks, and greased drainpipes.

In the 1980s, the factory buildings were also host to the Sex Ball, a party thrown by the Yale School of Architecture that ​“was known as the party of the year for architecture students throughout New England,” the accompanying notes relate. ​“The clock factory was perfect for a ball due to its distinct industrial architectural heritage, mystique and size…. With the drinking age still set at 18 and a sense of less adult supervision, faculty and students comfortably interacted in a way that may be foreign to our social norms today.” Vincent Scully, esteemed professor at the school of architecture, served on the panel of judges for the Sex Ball costume contest. ​“The idea for the sex theme and articulation through decoration came from the female students at the school,” the notes add; the tag line for the party emerged as ​“if you don’t like it don’t come.”

In the same era, the complex housed the Brick N’ Wood International Café, which, with a 1,000-person capacity, began a regional center for both punk and R&B. Lewis Whitehead — the great-great-grandson of a former New Haven Clock Company president — did a lot of the punk booking. He brought to town Corrosion of Conformity, GWAR, and GG Allin, who, as the notes relate, “was a wanted man at the time. With the New Haven police waiting at the door, GG performed naked except for cowboy boots and heckled both skinheads and shotgun-armed Hell’s Angels. GG ran through the labyrinth of the old factory and escaped without major incident.”

Meanwhile, from 1985 to 1987, local WNHC DJ James “Jazzy” Jordan partnered with owner Tony Yagovane and “turned the Brick N’ Wood into the region’s leading upscale R&B club. Every weekend the club was packed with thousands of people, with lines down the block.” With a strict, snazzy dress code enforced by staff in tuxedos, “patrons would rub shoulders with the likes of Bobby Brown and ‘Rocky’s’ Carl Weathers. Cornel West and bell hooks would take a break from their studies and teaching at the Yale Divinity School to bond on the dance floor.” Acts including Boyz II Men, Heavy D and the Boyz, Eugene Wilder, Marion Meadows, Bobby Womack and Run-DMC were driven up from New York City to play there, and security issues were “practically nonexistent.”

By the 1990s, however, the Brick N’ Wood was gone — and a new club moved into the space it had occupied. ​“Kurt’s 2 was the largest and most elaborate LGBTQ club in Connecticut in 1990,” the notes relate. ​“There was something for everyone in a very sleek ​‘Jetson’-esque environment.” With Metroline gossip columnist J.P. Monroe — a.k.a. Candy Monroe when in drag — often functioning as MC, the factory was ​“briefly the premier spot to see and be seen. Known as a ​‘discreet location’ that was easy to get to, complete with VIP parking and hot tubs in the interior courtyard, Kurt’s anchored a scene that was just as large as today, but nowhere near as commonly known.”

Todd Andresen, a doorman at Kurt’s, eventually moved into another part of the complex that was mostly given over to band rehearsal spaces and built an indoor skate park. ​“Word quickly got out, and skaters from all over the region came to party and ride. Increasingly uncomfortable with the packed situation, Todd set a specific time for the skaters to come called ​‘Tuesday Night Fights,’ requiring people to leave by 10:00 p.m. so as not to be discovered by the police.” But in 1999, Andresen moved out, in part due to the factory’s ​“physical deterioration.”

A Place For Art

In the 2000s, the exhibit relates how the factory complex continued to deteriorate and in some ways accelerate. ​“Around 2000, the New Haven Arts Council and associates in the city pursued a vision of artist-owned housing in the clock factory,” The project, led by community leader and arts maven Newt Schenk, was ​“designed to give artists a leg up in accumulating wealth and becoming financially secure. The group received a $30,000 grant from the city and commissioned a feasibility study. Ultimately the efforts came to a halt when Newt grew ill and died.”

However, the idea hasn’t gone away. Bill Kraus, ​“a mission-driven entrepreneur and historic real estate development consultant,” met Yagovane in 1999 and ​“they bonded over the idea of artist housing…. Kraus’s intentions for the clock factory are rooted not only in historic preservation but a brand of sustainable urban economic development, and a hope for empowerment of minority artists typically excluded from the mainstream art world.”

In 2018, Kraus took a tour of the factory complex as it changed owners, to the Oregon-based Reed Realty Group. The new developers, who also envision artist housing as part of their plan, have received tax breaks from the city and federal funds to clean up the site. There have been wrinkles. Last year a cache of guns was discovered under the floor during cleanup efforts. The developer evicted a long-running strip club, Scores, to make way for its plans after the club owed tens of thousands in back rent. Local documentary filmmaker Gorman Bechard is currently working on a film about the clock factory’s story; that film is slated for release in 2021.

Where does all these leave us right now? The exhibit’s notes point out that the area of the city is now ​“designated as an ​‘opportunity zone’ for development with the intent to return this neighborhood into a mixed-use environment. However, one thing is certain. The past is not returning … Rising rents, lack of space, public policy, the Internet and unfortunate events such as the 2016 Ghost Ship art collective warehouse ire in Oakland, California have solidified the resistance to the ideas of freedom and free expression that these buildings once held. Modern economics close the doors before there’s a chance to build them…. Everything is branded. Everything is an ​‘experience.’” It then ends with the cheeky line: ​“So we’re told…”

“Factory” thus does a marvelous job of framing a more pointed question about New Haven’s relationship to its arts scene, as it shows that thinking about it accurately requires threading a needle. On one side is the perennial danger of romanticizing the lives of artists who sacrifice income for their art. On the other is the danger of dismissing artists entirely if they’re not making lots of money doing their art. If you avoid both of these dangers, you come up with a picture like the one ​“Factory” presents: that, for decades, artists of various kinds made significant contributions to the cultural life of the city while living precarious lives themselves. ​“Factory” shows this by giving us the lines around the block for events at the clock factory and the fire in 1988 in part of the complex, the persistent ways that art was born and reborn in the buildings even as the buildings themselves deteriorated.

That story isn’t confined to the clock factory, either. Daggett Street Square was a warren of studios and illegal apartments — buzzing with artistic activity for decades and also inherently unsafe — until it was shut down in 2015. As rents have risen, the past couple years have seen a marked uptick in DIY spaces and house concerts around the area. Just this week hundreds flocked to an art exhibit opening in a vacant space in Fair Haven. In New Haven there’s a story of artists’ constant resilience, their ability to create art and reasons for people to get together on extremely limited resources, and they do it while regularly putting themselves in harm’s way. Could the city be doing more to make the lives of its artists less difficult? New Haven benefits from their work, after all. Being the cultural capital of the state is part of the city’s economic plan. Maybe it could start putting some more capital into the culture.