In Jaigantic’s Wake, Factory Plan Emerges

The site of a riverfront movie studio that never came to be is now slated to sprout a new housing-related manufacturer on a stretch of Fair Haven’s industrial waterfront.

Spinnaker Real Estate Partners, one of New Haven’s busiest apartment builders, is pursuing that plan after spending $2.8 million to buy more than a half-dozen vacant properties once eyed to become Jaigantic Studios.

According to warranty deeds posted to the city’s land records database on Tuesday, two holding companies called MS 185 NH LLC and MS 205 NH LLC spent a total of $2.8 million across two different transactions purchasing 25 James St., 185 River St., 197 River St., 205 River St., 218 Chapel St., 226 Chapel St., 234 Chapel St., and 242 Chapel St. from a holding company called 25 James LLC.

Those eight different properties include a handful of empty warehouses and several vacant plots of open land on the Fair Haven block bounded by River Street to the south, James Street to the west, Chapel Street to the north, and Lloyd Street to the east. The city most recently appraised them for tax purposes as worth a combined sum of more than $3.8 million.

The new owners of those properties are affiliates of the Norwalk-based developer Spinnaker. Spinnaker has already built more than 460 new luxury apartments at Audubon Square. It is almost done building 200 new apartments at the former Coliseum site. It is about to build 168 more high-end rentals on Fair Street. (They’re also the company behind the long-delayed, demolished-bank hotel development on Elm Street.)

So. Why has Spinnaker now stepped over into a largely derelict stretch of Fair Haven’s industrial waterfront?

“We hope to put in a manufacturing use that would support the housing industry,” Spinnaker CEO Clay Fowler said. He declined to go into more detail, noting that the project is ​“not yet ready to be announced.”

He said that, unlike with Spinnaker’s other developments around New Haven, this one will not be residential. At least, ​“not initially.”

“It’s part of fitting the use into the area where it has been traditionally industrial and at least manufacturing,” Fowler said. 

“All towns, all cities, do need some areas that are sacrosanct for uses that support general needs of the community,” he continued. In this case, manufacturing appears a better fit for this stretch of James Street, River Street, and Chapel Street.

Spinnaker Principal Matthew Edvardsen is taking the lead on this project for the Norwalk-based company.

In a separate comment provided to the Independent on Wednesday, Edvardsen stated that, ​“in the short term,” Spinnaker plans to ​“restore the past industrial / manufacturing use of the property and repopulate the buildings with productivity and employment.”

Longer term, he continued, ​“we would like to collaborate with the City and local stakeholders in a way that enables these properties to contribute most positively to the community’s ultimate visioning for the neighborhood.”

While it’s ​“too early to discuss a specific immediate use of the building with any certainty,” he said, ​“one thought is that the property supports Spinnaker’s housing production efforts in the region allowing for an expansion of Spinnaker’s off-site volumetric (modular) construction capabilities.”

These underused River Street properties sit in a post-industrial part of Fair Haven that has long been eyed for ambitious commercial redevelopment plans. 

Some of those newer projects — like Armada Brewing and Art to Frames — have actually been built, are open and are doing business

Others — like Jaigantic Studio’s planned and much-hyped $200 million conversion of mostly empty lots and former factory buildings into 25 new soundstages replete with thousands of jobs and movie-and-TV-production-related economic development – never came to fruition. (Other big River Street projects over the years that never actually happened: New England Brewing. Colony Hardware. Velodrome.)

These Spinnaker-acquired properties were previously intended for that failed Jaigantic enterprise. They’re also located right across the street from where the city last year knocked down the last of the derelict former Bigelow Boiler factory buildings, and sold that lot for $1 to a Fair Haven company looking to construct a new 10,000 square-foot commercial/industrial building.

The company that sold these River-James-Chapel Street properties to Spinnaker, meanwhile, is controlled in part by Westville resident Alan Tuchmann.

Tuchmann was one of several local financial backers of Jaigantic. His company, 25 James LLC, acquired these now-sold Fair Haven properties through foreclosure back in 2022. These properties had been ​“under contract” with the movie studio to be incorporated into that Jaigantic endeavor.

But then those movie studio plans fell through. Tuchmann was left carrying these empty industrial properties.

So Tuchmann and his business partner had to find a new buyer for this land they hadn’t intended to be left holding.

“We marketed it, a bunch of people looked,” Tuchmann said, and ultimately his company decided to sell to Spinnaker.