Allan Appel photos
Kenia and Michael Massey and Kenia's mother, Thomasina Nichols.
Future firefighters with current firefighter Jasmine Williams, during a Friday visit to the Black Corner Store.
Kenia and Michael Massey are re-defining the significance of the corner convenience store, especially one in a Black community.
The Black Corner Store, at 277 Edgewood Ave. in the Dwight neighborhood, has a whole array of business entrepreneurship programs to inspire kids, an Amazon locker used for pick-ups by Yale students to help diversify clientele, and it’s poised to become an engine for community business development and renewal.
Aliyah Elliott and NHFD "tillerman" Tom Carey
And on Friday afternoon it also had the support of a cool “tillered” ladder truck and its crew of firefighters – Pat McGovern, Tom Carey, John Gotaski, and Capt. Rob Balkun.
Friday afternoon they were on hand as part of the Masseys’ “Business of the Week” initiative for “children in underserved communities to have the opportunity for one-on-one interactions and to learn about the diverse possibilities available to them,” as Kenia Massey described the program.
And interact they did.
Sixteen-year-old Michael Jones climbed up into the tillerman’s cab – the top cabin at the back of the huge ($2 million) ladder truck – to learn how the tillerman communicates constantly with the driver to negotiate turns and to move the truck through New Haven’s often narrow, challenging, 19th-century streets.
When he climbed down, Jones said he just might give some thought to a career in the fire service and that the coolest part, at least from his current perspective, is “when you get the hose and you start spraying!”
Ten-year-old Aliyah Elliott, a fourth grader at the nearby Troup School, was more committed to being a firefighter after she climbed down from Tom Carey’s tiller loft.
Then when she learned that Firefighter Jasmine Williams was part of the crew that had arrived at the Black Corner Store, she declared “a girl firefighter! Her eyes lit up,” reported Aliyah’s mom Holly Congdon.
She learned there were approximately a dozen active women firefighters in New Haven currently and, that if you tote up the weight of boots, gloves, coat, hood, and mask, and other equipment, she must be able to carry between 50 and 60 pounds, on average, exactly the same as her male colleagues,
Then the kids scampered away to, where else, the corner store.
Michael Massey grew up nearby and for him this particular corner store was a place where a little boy’s eyes grew larger, his horizons expanded as he checked out baseball cards and other great stuff on sale. He always had his eye on this place.
Meanwhile Kenia Massey, the woman he came to marry, in 2018, had family roots, like him, at the nearby Union Temple FWB Church. She comes from a family of small business entrepreneurs and from early on was delivering food her church did not use, or that was left over from her own event-planning business, to homeless encampments in San Antonio, where she spent formative years.
When the Masseys got together and the corner store was available, to somehow combine doing good deeds with advancing local entrepreneurship seemed, in their view, somehow pre-destined, especially to do it through this particular store. So they purchased it.
“This is very personal for both of us. God played a part,” Kenia Massey said. There were other business opportunities, “but we wanted this one.”
But God’s work on earth must truly be our own, and the beginning of developing the Black Corner Store was rocky. During a brief interview in the comfortable banquettes at the front of the store, before the firefighters arrived, Kenia recalled how tough it was to make the $4,000 monthly rent.
They couldn’t pay all the bills for a stretch and the store had to be shut down. Then came Covid and its challenges. They rented some of the space inside to a catering business, but that business was only able to keep afloat for three months.
Through the Black Business Alliance, however, the Masseys were able to obtain a $25,000 loan and the City of New Haven came through with grants, as did the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.
The Masseys shifted the business model, and formally became a non-profit, Black Corner Store Investments, with business development programs, financial literacy classes for kids, a chess club (that teaches you to focus, to concentrate, Kenia said), and a literature club for kids is in place once a week, and others on the way.
And the latest most ambitious development: A pending $2.8 million grant from the state’s Community Investment Fund. If it comes through, the Masseys said initial plans call for building six affordable apartments above the store and turning the spacious street-level area and full basement into four of what Kenia called “business suites.”
Although the details of the arrangements remain to be worked out, the thrust is a simple one, based on the experience of the Black Corner Store: to create a space where local entrepreneurs will be able to establish themselves long enough to begin to thrive without before threatened, and often, derailed, by un-affordable rents.
The Masseys expect to hear if the grant is approved as early as next month.
In the meantime, more immediate plans call for bringing in a weekly STEM program to the unusual corner store at 277 Edgewood.