Duo Dickinson Photo
With its zipline, climbing wall, and almost overwhelming selection of goods for sale, Jordan’s Furniture has created a big buzz in New Haven. It may also serve as a sign of Connecticut’s failed urban renewal, and inability to keep manufacturing in the state.
The history starts well before Jordan’s opening in 2015. In 1970, the Gant Shirt Company put its eggs in one manufacturing basket: the state of Connecticut. It was logical at that moment: New Haven had procured massive federal funding for urban renewal, including a huge landfill of Long Wharf in the wake of the I‑95 construction in the previous decade. Already, firms like Armstrong Rubber and Sargent Hardware were in the city and thriving.
But urban renewal didn’t shake out the way New Haven’s then-governing body hoped it would. Sargent, now owned by Assa Alboy, changed hands several times. The Armstrong Rubber plant and headquarters became Pirelli, then sold to Ikea, where preservationists kept the Marcel Breuer modernist icon undead as a huge billboard armature for the new Ikea superstore.
Gant too left New England, and then North America, to make its clothing. Its building husk, however, did not: it was gleefully reanimated by the New Haven Register in 1981, where huge printing equipment slipped into the vast spaces once used to assemble shirts. Within 20 years, those presses ceased to be economically viable; the internet killed the necessity for much of media bricks and mortar. Now another furniture company, Jordan’s has moved in where cloth and newsprint were reformed.
Jordan’s has been heralded as an exciting business development by many in the city, and it’s true that an occupied building is better than an empty one. But the question remains: is the store reflective of the way Connecticut is going, in selling a lot of stuff — little to none of which is made in America — but producing almost none of it? And if so, is Yale the lone beacon of future growth in the state?
Join me as I weigh in on the latest episode of “Design Czar.” To listen, click on or download the audio above.