Thomas Breen file photo
Future home for workforce training ... and housing and community space?
Mayor Justin Elicker dropped a hint in paragraph 46 of his annual State of the City address about the potential future state of the Goffe Street Armory: as the home for a new vocational school.
He gestured towards that educational reuse of the long-vacant and dilapidated Dixwell building in the closing section of the address he gave to the Board of Alders Monday night, which the Independent reprinted in full here.
“And our team continues to make steady progress on the vision of a vocational school in New Haven — and we have our sights on the Goffe Street Armory as a potential home for such a school,” Elicker said. “I know this is important to so many of you in this room, as it is to me. We’re excited at the potential such a school can have for so many of our young people.”
This isn’t the first time Elicker has spoken up about trying to create a new vocational school in town, as the alders OK’d spending several million dollars in federal Covid-relief funds to explore just that.
Nor is it the first time the city has put forward grand hopes for a major reuse of the stately, empty, 155,000 square-foot, red-brick building, which was first constructed in 1930.
But that Elicker’s state of the city address does gesture towards the coalescing of a more concrete plan of putting that particular use at this particular location.
“We’ve been exploring for quite some time the concept of a tech school or a career pathway school,” Elicker told the Independent in a followup interview. He said his administration has been looking into career pathways that could ensure students’ success in local jobs that pay living wages in sectors that are expanding.
Those sectors that could be the subject of a new vocational school, he said, including health sciences; architecture and construction; transportation, distribution and logistics; manufacturing; and informational technology.
He said the city has held “two large convenings” with public school representatives, state legislators, local university leaders, and others about how and where to build out such a vocational school. “We’ve focused on the Armory being a potential site for this,” and have been working with the Armory Steering Committee to flesh out the idea.
The structure of how such a school would operate, he said, would be similar to Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). “Basically, it wouldn’t be a school that students go to only. They go to their home school in the morning, and then they go to tech school in the afternoon to get additional training.”
He said such a tech school could also offer evening training sessions for adults, in addition to afternoon sessions for high schoolers.
Elicker said that the city’s current vision for the Armory is for it to potentially host three distinct and mutually supportive uses: a vocational school, a “community type of use, like an arts space,” and housing, with ideally a portion of those residences being affordable.
“The Armory is gigantic, and we think it’s potentially appropriate for all of these things,” he said. “Because it’s such a huge space to operate, we’d also need a revenue stream. There’s where the housing could be helpful.”
He said the Armory strikes the city as a uniquely appropriate location for such a tech school in part because it is “centralized” and “very close to Hillhouse, [and] easy for students to get to for midday programming.”
So. What’s next?
“The building’s a mess,” Elicker said. The city has applied for $8 million through the state’s Community Investment Fund “to bring the building up to a state of good repair.” That means fixing the roof and remediating asbestos and other pollutants.
He said the city expects to hear about whether or not that application is successful later this month. This is the second time the city has applied for that level of CIF funds for this project.
He also noted that the city did receive a $250,000 CIF grant that’s helped with planning for what the Armory could be. The city is now “doing some initial design work,” and New Haven Public Schools is “working on an operational program and budget to design out what the [vocational] school might look like.”
Rubin, at a 2023 Goffe Street Armory planning meeting.
Reached for comment on Friday, Armory Steering Committee co-leader and longtime Armory advocate Elihu Rubin confirmed that the city had indeed raised this possibility of a vocational/workforce training use at the Armory in a recent meeting with a “core group of advocates” and public school representatives.
“I am really excited about the possibilities of having a creative learning center,” a use that fosters opportunities, skills, and job training, at the Armory, he said.
One of the most promising parts of the mayor’s mentioning of the Armory in the state of the city and his latest explanation to the Independent about the potential vo-tech plans for this site, Rubin continued, is that they indicate that “the City of New Haven will continue to be a long-term steward and potentially owner of this building, and that there’s a public-sector anchor tenant that would provide services.” Many community members have voiced interest in exactly that.
“The fact that the city is stepping in to stake a claim on the Armory, to say we see this as a potentially important place for city priorities and that those priorities are around education, not just for young people but adults to find opportunities … is something that’s come up again and again” in community planning for this space. “I’m very buoyed by this statement” by the mayor.
He said that the mayor’s recognition that the Armory could be the home for a vo-tech school, housing, and community arts space is also an acknowledgment that “there’s more than enough space in the Armory for more than one thing.”
Rubin stressed two priorities he’d like the city to consider as it moves forward with planning for the Armory’s reuse.
“We have strongly reminded the city that the drill hall should be preserved as an open space,” Rubin said. “No major building, like walls and rooms, should be carved out of the drill hall. The drill hall should retain its potential to serve as a big gathering space for any number of different programs, a flexible space that could be programmed differently over the course of a year.”
And, he said, it’s important that “the process remain transparent,” and that “public input will matter” as to how exactly the Armory will be put back to productive use.
Fellow Armory Committee co-leader Nadine Horton agreed. She described the vo-tech school as a good idea for the Armory, and stressed that, ideally, it would provide “practical skills not just for young folks, but for adults as well,” particularly those returning from incarceration.
She noted that the Whalley Avenue jail is right next door to the Armory. “If they could literally go from that door into a space where they could learn a skill” would be quite the positive transformation for their lives, and for the neighborhood.
