Zachary Groz
Atticus Market: Another bathroom to come?
Rendering of proposed addition, as viewed from Linden.
A group of East Rock neighbors are raising a stink about Atticus Market’s plan to tack on a new 600-square foot structure to the grocery and convenience store to make way for another bathroom.
The proposal to expand the East Rock satellite of the downtown cafe and bookseller was met with opposition from around the corner at a Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) hearing at City Hall Tuesday night.
Charles Negaro, the owner of Atticus, has submitted a request to the BZA for a host of zoning relief for the 771 Orange St. market.
In particular, he’s applied for a variance to permit building coverage of 58 percent where 30 percent is permitted (and 46 percent already exists); a front yard of 0 feet where 17 feet is required; a rear yard of 0 feet where 25 feet is required; a neighborhood convenience use with net floor area used for sales or other business purposes in excess of 1,500 square feet; and a special exception to permit the “expansion/enlargement” of a neighborhood convenience use.
All of this would allow for the construction of a new section of the building that would close off the space near where the store now has canopies and outdoor seating on Linden Street (see rendering above.) The seating area by the front of the store facing Orange Street would remain as is.
East Rockers testifying against the plan at the hearing said the addition would jut too far out into the sidewalk, make it harder for locals to find parking, and push the store’s dumpster further up a residential block.
The BZA did not vote Tuesday night on the Atticus expansion zoning relief, instead sending it along to the City Plan Commission for further review. But they heard arguments for and against the proposal from the applicant, his lawyer Ben Trachten, and five members of the public, in advance of the City Plan vote scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 19. The BZA will then take the matter back up at its next monthly meeting for a final vote.
Trachten and Negaro told the commissioners that the exception they’re seeking for the site is needed for Atticus Market to fully comply with OSHA regulations, which require businesses with more than 15 employees to provide them with two or more “adequate and readily accessible” bathrooms. The current situation, Negaro said, has Atticus Market employees waiting alongside customers to use the bathrooms on-site. The exception would give the store room to build an additional ADA-compliant bathroom, alleviating the wait times and bringing the space up to code.
“We are so busy most days of the week that there is a line,” said Negaro. “If any employee wants to jump off of doing something super busy and go use a bathroom, they have to stand in a line. Of course we let them do that if they need to, but it’s very difficult, and if someone needs to go, they’ve gotta go.”
The plan, however, allocates only 50 of a projected 600 square feet for the new bathroom, which opponents of the addition pounced on at the hearing, calling the argument around OSHA compliance a Trojan Horse for an expansion of retail space at the market. In New Haven, the maximum footprint of a convenience store in a residential area, per the city’s zoning ordinance, is 1,500 square feet, which Atticus Market’s 2375-square foot space already exceeds after earlier exceptions were made for the store. The latest exception, if approved, would increase the footprint to 2987 square feet, nearly double the usual max. That, according to neighbors, is far too much.
“When Atticus moved in, and they brought a whole lot more people than Romeo [the store that occupied the space for three decades up until 2019] ever did, we have additional car traffic, which makes it very difficult for people who live there to find parking on the street,” said Rene Almeling, who lives a few doors down from the market on Linden Street.
Almeling told the board that she represented a group of 18 neighbors who had coalesced in the 48 hours before the hearing after learning more about the details of the expansion and how it would affect their “little, tiny, quiet, one-way street,” which, she said, has already seen “a lot of disruption” since the market opened in 2021.
“They routinely have semi-trucks delivering,” she said. “They block crosswalks on Linden and Orange Street, they put out garbage cans […] those dumpsters get picked up by their trash service, which routinely come before 7 a.m., which you’re not supposed to do in a residential area.”
In his allotted rebuttal time, Trachten countered that the footprint of the addition is largely a product of the need to hue closely to overlapping accessibility guidelines, including “minimum travel widths for accessible corridors,” linking the new bathroom area to the main convenience/grocery space. More to the point, he said that expansion would be an overall boon for the neighborhood, which not even the market’s competitors, like Nica’s and P&M, opposed, and he cast the neighbors’ testimony against the project as “aggressively anti-business.”
“The idea that getting bigger is a bad thing is just wrong,” said Trachten. “This use is precisely the type of neighborhood use that you want to see thriving and grow.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the area where the canopies and outdoor seating are near Orange and Linden would be enclosed by this new structure. The article has been corrected, with site plan renderings and documents pictured below, to show that it is the area “near” the outdoor seating and canopies that will be enclosed. The front seating area by Orange Street would remain as is.
Neighbor Rene Almeling: Expansion adds to "disruption."
Atticus's expansion site plan docs.
