Paul Bass Photo
Members of two species gather to cut the ribbon at the new Cambria Hotel on Route 34.
New Haven closed out the year with two of three planned new hotels getting past the finish line and opening to the public with a festive holiday party.
The latest is an upscale ($185-per-night) 130-room Cambria Hotel, where human and canine officials cut the ceremonial opening ribbon Thursday evening on the gradually filling-in median block of Route 34 bordered by Dwight Street, Legion Avenue, Orchard Street, and MLK Blvd.
Cambria’s Choice Hotels division bought the property for $2.8 million. An outfit called LCP Group invested in the project; Crescent Hotels & Resorts was hired to run it.
Earlier this year another upscale New Haven hotel opened, the Hotel Marcel on Long Wharf. Together with the Blake, which opened downtown in 2019, and the Graduate New Haven, the renovated former Duncan, which opened in 2020, New Haven has in three years made progress towards addressing what business leaders considered an economy-stalling shortage of hotel rooms. The site of another planned hotel, for the corner of Orange and Elm Streets, remains a hole in the ground, and the developer has pivoted to a plan for apartments there instead.
Hotel officials are aiming the Cambria at business and leisure travelers to town visiting Yale New Haven Hospital or (eventually) the under-construction Yale New Haven neurosciences center or Yale University, which was represented at Thursday’s ribbon-cutting party by Handsome Dan (pictured) the mascot bulldog.
City officials, business leaders and public safety leaders …
… including Police Chief Karl Jacobson and Assistant Chiefs Bertram Ettienne and David Zannelli joined Handsome Dan in enjoying a holiday-themed party where …
… bartender Pete Borowski poured vintage Hooker IPA .…
… Metro Narcisis’s sax solo (watch/listen in above video) channeled vintage hotel lobby Yuletide jazz …
… noshers sampled cheeses and olives …
… and Dan sniffed out the putative presents.
New Haven’s Kristen Threatt (at left in photo) and Brian Burkett-Thompson (at right) lifted celebratory bottles of their homegrown and marketed Gorilla Lemonade, which is sold in the Cambria lobby, with LCP CEO Francis Lively.
The New Haven commercial connections continued upstairs with a fifth-floor display of the Elm City-invented lollipop …
… and sixth-floor lobby tribute to the New Haven-invented typewriter.
Choice Senior Vice-President of Upscale Brands Janis Cannon (pictured) said the local-themed displays reflect her company’s search for a “sense of space/sense of place” with its hotels, aiming to make them “brothers and sisters” with distinct geographical identities rather than generic “identical twins.”
Doors were left open on the third floor for guests to view sample rooms like this one, which showed no signs of having been visited yet by Handsome Dan.