Ex-Cleaners Ground Broken For 64 Apartments

The ​“route men” are long gone from the former Monarch Cleaners in West River.

So are the pleas of ​“Uncle Sammy, you got a summer job for me?” that sisters Cathy Dziekan and Jan Lougal still remember their dad being asked by extended family in need of work. 

But the history of their family’s long-time laundry business will live on — in the name and in the story behind 64 new affordable apartments now on the rise on Derby Avenue.

That latest residential construction project was the subject of a Tuesday morning press conference at 149 Derby Ave.

That 1.77-acre ex-industrial site was home for decades to a commercial laundry facility known as the New England Linen company, and formerly as Monarch Cleaners.

In May, a holding company controlled by the Avon-based firm Honeycomb Real Estate Partners and the Weatogue-based Vesta Corporation purchased 149 Derby, 169 Derby, and two adjacent parcels on Ellsworth Avenue for $1.95 million. That acquisition followed the November 2022 site plan approval by the City Plan Commission for the construction of 64 new apartments at that site.

All of those apartments will be restricted for tenants making between 50 and 80 percent of the area median income (AMI), which currently translates to annual incomes of between $58,050 and $92,900 for a family of four.

As Honeycomb’s Lewis Brown explained on Tuesday, the past two years have been a ​“critically challenging” time for putting together financing for this $27 million project, thanks to ​“rising interest rates” and ​“soaring construction costs.”

But, thanks to a mix of Connecticut Housing Finance Authority 4% Low-Income Tax Credits and state brownfield remediation grants and city American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, among other sources, the developers were able to get all the money in place, demolish the former laundry building, undertake the necessary environmental remediation (80 percent done so far), and begin construction. The new apartment building, rooftop solar panels and all, should be done and open within about a year.

“We’re super excited to be a neighbor here in this neighborhood, and to be a good neighbor,” Brown said.

Speaker after speaker on Tuesday heralded the conversion of a vacant, underused plot into 64 more below-market-rent places to live — all as apartments keep bursting forth all around town, including in the West River neighborhood nearby on Miller Street.

“Thank you, Lewis, for doing what you said you were gonna do,” city Deputy Economic Administrator Arlevia Samuel said, referring back to her and Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers’s first meeting with Brown on the Derby Avenue site two years ago. 

“Something good is coming out of something good here,” added Mayor Justin Elicker, referring back to the site’s history as a commercial laundry that anchored the neighborhood.

That history was on full display during Dziekan and Lougal’s time at the mic towards the top of the press conference.

The two sisters said that their dad, Sam Alea, worked at Monarch his entire life — from sweeping the floors in the 1930s to eventually becoming the company’s president and part owner.

“Back then, the laundry business was pretty big,” Dziekan said, pointing to a mid-20th century photo of the three-story white Monarch building, with several dozen uniformed ​“route men” — or drivers who would traverse the city, picking up and delivering clean underwear and bedsheets and other linens — lined up proudly in front.

The site employed hundreds of New Haveners over the years, Dziekan continued, including many members of her own family, who were always reaching out to her dad for summer work. Dziekan and Lougal remembered working in the Monarch’s upper-floor offices early on in life. They described the place as ​“always a caring atmosphere” in which to work.

“We are so grateful for the respect and care given by Honeycomb to this corner” and to carrying on the legacy of their dad’s business, Dziekan said. ​“I mean, you’re keeping the name Monarch. That’s huge.”

While the new Monarch-named apartment building references the Monarch butterfly, Dziekan said, the Monarch of the older laundry service referred to a lion, the ​“king of the jungle.” That Monarch lion logo, she said, was printed on ​“all the route trucks” — and will live on, now, in the name of new apartments to come.