Arthur Delot-Vilain photos
Derek Baker: 201 Munson "fit all the bills"
Derek Baker unloaded his U‑Haul truck after wrapping up the roughly 700-mile drive from metro Detroit to Munson Street, as he prepared to enter a new stage of his life studying MRIs and brain scans at Yale — while living out of a brand new luxury apartment complex in a development-rich stretch of Dixwell-Newhallville-Science Park.
Baker, who’s starting a neuroradiology fellowship at Yale, moved to New Haven late last week from the Detroit metropolitan area.
With his father, his wife, and his two young children split across a car and the U‑Haul truck, Baker made it to town in the middle of the night on Thursday.
“We only had a virtual tour,” Baker said, so he and his family were “pleasantly surprised” by the apartment at 201 Munson St.
That’s the new 398-unit apartment complex built atop a 13-acre former contaminated industrial site that has been in the works since 2017 and that, as of this summer, has welcomed its first few dozen tenants — including Baker.
His family was looking for something family friendly and walkable, with easy access to daycare — and the apartments at 201 Munson, now going by Axis201, “fit all the bills.”
The complex, whose units range from studios to three-bedroom apartments, is replete with amenities, including a golf simulator and a pool, the latter of which isn’t yet functional. The complex’s website lists rents ranging from $1,909 per month for a studio apartment to $2,417 for a one-bedroom to $4,635 for a three-bedroom townhouse.
Another potential 201 Munson tenant, a nurse who had recently moved from to New Haven from Manchester, Conn. and who declined to be named or photographed for this article, praised Axis201’s amenities as she toured the complex.
She said she felt caught between a “rock and a hard place” as a young single woman. “I want to be out here [in New Haven],” she said, “but I want to be safe.” Axis201’s all-in-one style, she felt, might help.
The Axis201 apartments are being built by the New York City-based firm Hudson-Meridian Construction Group and managed by Paredim Partners. Between 20 and 30 of the 398 units are filled, according to Paredim Managing Director David Parisier.
“We’re moving people in all the time,” Parisier said, with “a lot of Yale traffic, a lot of Yale med, hospital, hospital, hospital.”
The buildings are still under construction, though Parisier expects the full complex worth of apartments to be “delivered by the end of the third quarter.”
Axis201 is the latest project in the ongoing Science Park-area construction boom, which also includes the 283-unit Twining Properties development at 315 Winchester Ave and the 168-unit RJ Development & Advisory project at 222 Canal St. And that’s not to mention plenty more apartments planned for other areas of the ex-Winchester Arms factory on Munson Street and Winchester Avenue, as well as Beulah’s new 69-unit mass timber affordable apartment complex at the intersection of Munson, Dixwell, and Orchard, as well as the decade-old Winchester Lofts.
“In the next year and a half, that neighborhood of New Haven will experience change, which is always exciting,” said Parisier.
The complex's townhomes on Munson St.