Fearing Decline, 9th Square Unites

Newly organized Ninth Square merchants are floating ways to stabilize a neighborhood where they worry that recent gains are starting to slip away in the face of business closures and increased crime.

Spurred by an attack this past Friday on an Artspace employee, business owners regrouped at the Orange Street art gallery on Wednesday afternoon to talk through why their historic neighborhood in downtown’s southeast corner seems to be faltering, even as their counterparts west of Church Street seemed to be flourishing.

The shopkeepers questioned why so many buildings are sitting vacant on Orange Street and how drug dealing has taken over bus stops on Chapel Street. After pointed questions about the city’s next steps and a self-examination of their own role, the group agreed to schedule a standing monthly meeting.

During the 90-minute chat, the attendees squeezed around a table set up next to colorful photographs and reflective boxes. Grouped on one side, the business owners included Helen Kauder, Artspace’s executive director; Ben Berkowitz, SeeClickFix’s founder; Bruce Ditman, Meat & Co.’s co-owner; and John Ginnetti, 116 Crown’s mixologist. Clustered at the other end, officials included Win Davis, the Town Green’s manager; Matthew Nemerson, city government’s economic development administrator; Carmen Mendez, downtown specialist for the Livable City Initiative (LCI), the government’s anti-blight agency; and Lt. Mark O’Neill, downtown’s top cop..

Though they sparred about the exact details, everyone agreed that the Ninth Square — a once blighted area revived as a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood in the 1990s and early 2000s — is changing again.

Aided by spots like the Grove, more office workers are reporting to the neighborhood for their day jobs. Popular nightlife draws, like Skappo and Amoy’s restaurants, Firehouse 12, Cafe Nine along with Artspace, continue drawing people to the area. But other businesses have vacated the area, as in many other commercial districts nationwide struggling to compete with online sales, Berkowitz observed. In recent months, the Ninth Square lost Thali Restaurant, Neville Wisdom’s designer clothing, Acme Furniture, Fresh Yoga, Reynolds Art Gallery, Rendezvous and Sassy.

“It’s never been like that,” said Berkowitz, who has worked in the area for a decade.

Meanwhile, the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority is in the process of finding a buyer for buildings with 335 apartments in the district, which need millions of dollars in renovations as their St. Louis-based owner has fallen behind in debt payments. And a key piece of real estate — the former Coliseum site — remains an undeveloped surface parking lot as a developer, LiveWorkLearnPlay, has fallen years behind in plans to build a $400 million mixed-use project there.

At the same time, a crackdown on the Green has pushed loiterers down Chapel Street, into an area where drugs change hands in front of fenced-in lots and surface parking. Many of those swapping pills are suspected to be out-of-town patients of the APT Foundation, a treatment facility for those with opioid use disorder, waiting for a bus to carry them back to the suburbs.

Those simmering issues boiled over on Friday night, when an agitated man entered Artspace and walked past the artwork to the organization’s office space.

“May I help you?” an employee asked. ​“You’re not supposed to be back here.”

The man grabbed her, holding her neck in a chokehold while punching her back. She screamed, and a visitor scared him away.

Police officers canvassed the neighborhood and picked up a suspect who met the description, whom the Artspace employee confirmed as her attacker.

“This guy is one of our regulars downtown, and he’s constantly a nuisance under the influence. He’s not usually violent. A lot of times, we find him passed out,” Lt. O’Neill said. ​“I don’t know what he was on that day. He’ll take pretty much whatever he can.” The cops charged the man with third-degree assault, which covers anything from a slap to a punch, and breach of peace.

The employee went to the hospital for a check-up, and doctors confirmed she wasn’t seriously injured. Still shaken up, she is taking time off work and seeking counseling, Kauder said.

While traumatic for her staff, the incident is ​“part of a larger story” about the neighborhood, Kauder said. ​“When I shared what happened, I was amazed and alarmed at the number of other folks that immediately came out with issues of their own,” she said. Kauder said she worries that if they didn’t get the situation under control, business could take a bigger hit.

Berkowitz agreed that the neighborhood is reaching a tipping point. ​“It’s unfortunate that this is the flash point for getting together and having the meeting,” he said, but ​“reactivating this neighborhood is a way to solve it.”

Exactly what that rejuvenation might look like proved tougher to figure out.

The merchants urged Nemerson to push on with development deals for 808 – 810 Chapel St., corner lots that had been scorched in a fire and ripped down. And they asked him to change bus routes to drop suburbanites off directly in front of the APT Foundation.

But Nemerson said he doesn’t have the power to change those items, which are in the hands of private developers and state agencies. He said the mayor’s administration has been trying to do both for the last four years, but progress has been slow. (Mayor Toni Harp said Monday that her administration is proposing plans for new bus hubs elsewhere in town as part of a response to the problem.)

Nemerson did say his office is trying to put together a deal for a residential skyscraper like 360 State St. to fill in a surface lot between Center and Chapel Streets between Chapel and Orange.

By the meeting’s end, the participants agreed to some short-term changes.

Lt. O’Neill said he has already stationed two officers for a walking beat and he’ll put an additional officer on a bike in the area.

Davis, of the Town Green, said he’ll order another lighting survey. He wants to make sure that he is tracking all the streetlamps that have gone dark. And he’s going to try to get landlords with vacant properties to keep their lights on. Up ahead, he hopes that they can convince property owners to put displays in the windows, whether simple advertisements for a lease or installations by artists.

And the merchants said they’ll continue meeting monthly to keep the conversation going.

“Whether it’s a block watch or having everyone here on speed dial, whether it’s feeling like they have allies in their neighborhoods, that takes an immediate network I’d like to have strengthened,” Kauder said.

They also said they’d join in quarterly meetings with the entire Chapel East corridor’s property owners, which LCI’s Mendez has hosted for about three years. Out of those discussions, Mendez said, she hopes to distill the neighborhood’s identity.

“Some people say the Ninth Square is artsy, so let’s capitalize on that. Some say funky, which I’m not sure how to interpret. Some people say we should look like Chapel West,” she said. ​“But it’s up to you and what you want to do.”