ACME Closing; 3,000 Artifacts Need Home

The last of the old Ninth Square merchants, ACME Furniture, is in the process of closing to make way for new apartments — while a third-generation member of the family is scurrying to preserve much of the New Haven history inside the building.

Alan Greenberg, whose father started ACME in 1912 and the vintage furniture component in the 1920s, confirmed this week that he plans to put the building at 33 Crown St. up for sale, most probably to a developer who will continue the reborn downtown district’s apartment boom.

At 75, Greenberg said, he felt it was time to move on, especially given all the changes in New Haven. His family’s store survived two waves of change: First urban renewal, which tore down many of the surrounding buildings; and then the turn-of-the-century transition of the Ninth Square from a low-rent mercantile area into a residential and entertainment district.

The building is valued at over $1 million. All the surrounding blocks have either spawned new apartment buildings or are in the process of doing so.

This week, items were being tagged for auction by The Hamilton Group, a group of auctioneers in New Jersey that is helping Greenberg and his sisters, former owners Eileen Schuffman and Deena Kuper, sell hundreds of pieces of vintage furniture and historical memorabilia, like the family’s old Edison dictaphone and typewriters.

“ACME brings you back to the ​‘80s. It’s always a marvel. But I have to believe that the building would be better as developments, luxury condos,” remarked city economic development chief Matthew Nemerson, noting that features like the original tin ceilings violated fire code.

“Certainly the exterior of the building is priceless,” he added.

Not everyone in the Greenberg ACME household is pleased about the move. Alan Greenberg served an eviction notice on his son, Robert, who maintains a museum of objects ​“made in New Haven” on the building’s third and fourth floors. He said he wants the business to stay in the family for subsequent generations.

Robert was served the eviction notice last week while speaking to a visiting class of Yale undergraduates about New Haven’s history. He has until this Wednesday to reply to the eviction notice, after which (if he disputes it) he says the family will begin a forcible eviction.

As of Tuesday afternoon, he said he is looking for a lawyer with hopes of contest the eviction. (His legal grounds: His late grandfather would have liked the family business to continue.)

“If I had a dream, it’s that the developer buys the building and lets me keep the museum in the building,” he said. ​“I don’t know what I’m going to do. But I do know that I’m gonna fight the eviction right now.”

Greenberg said he has spent 30 years and most ​“of my savings” amassing, purchasing and arranging objects for the museum, a hodge-podge of historical objects and archived material like ACME radio ads and newspaper clippings, unearthed pottery, glass and stoneware, material tableaux from old area manufacturers like Winchester Arms and Horowitz Bros., and a room dedicated to the city’s industrial past, with ephemera from the Yankee Doodle, Lender’s Bagels and shops that used to line Crown and State streets.

He said he is distressed about the pending sale for two reasons.

One: If the eviction stands, he’ll need to move the museum’s collection — over 3,000 historical objects and counting — to a new, undisclosed location in Fair Haven and start rearranging it all over again. He said in that scenario he aims to channel the centennial spirit of industry that the ACME name carried, but is concerned about the building’s lack of climate control and security.

Two: The sale necessitates abandoning a building— the circa 1877 33 Crown St. property — that he sees as both a family heirloom and a window onto the Ninth Square’s industrial past, with still-untapped archaeological potential where there was once a blacksmith’s shop.

From its strong turn-of-the-century bones and tin ceilings to one of the state’s first hoist elevators, the building should be ​“restored, not renovated,” he said. ​“This is a code of honor and a celebration of our past.” 

“The depth of this is super emotional for me,” he said, looking out of ACME’s third-floor windows onto the apartment complex across the street. ​“It’s out of my control. I’m angry and disgusted and terribly sad. I’m watching a death happen.”

That death, he added, is to him a local symptom of a national trend — old buildings and the businesses within making way for shiny new developments and the wealthy tenants they attract.

“Many ghosts are there,” said city arts czar Andy Wolf, whose family owned and operated a cabinet-making business at the corner of Wall and State Streets until it was torn down in the 1970s. ​“You had ACME, and Chamberlain, and Lincoln Furniture … It’s definitely a landmark in my estimation.”

In 1912, Robert Greenberg’s paternal grandfather Joseph, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, started the business ​“in different locations around New Haven,” buying a property on what was then the intersection of Wooster and State Streets in the 1930s. He called it American Moving Company, then Acme Moving & Storage Co.. Through the 1960s, Joseph Greenberg was able to expand operations, involving his son Alan as one building became two, three, and then four between State and Wooster, Asylum, Temple and Crown streets.

Then urban renewal hit and then-Mayor Richard C. Lee had different plans for that area. Bulldozers figured prominently in those plans. The family risked losing the buildings to an eminent domain claim that ultimately went through.

ACME wasn’t finished, though: Joseph had already purchased an old building at 33 Crown St. that had previously housed a baking soda factory and blacksmithing shop. He moved ACME there and kept doing ​“everything he could to get his name out,” according to Robert. Joseph died shortly thereafter, in 1966, a 25-year-old Alan Greenberg taking over the business.

Robert Greenberg ​“grew up on Crown Street” around the family business. Although he was relatively young when his grandfather died, he recalled Joseph instilling in him a strong work ethic and incessant curiosity about the city of his youth.

“I found great value in this man who’d given everything to the business,” he said of his grandfather. ACME, to him even as a child, was ​“the magnificent essence of hundreds of companies,” and ​“the soul of New Haven.”

Robert headed to RISD for college, then to New York City for 26 years. Despite snagging a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment, he had a certain sense that he would return full time to ACME. As a teen, he had watched his father expand the ACME operation into the Chamberlain building (where Artspace is today). He saw from afar as his father was forced to vacate the Chamberlain space as city planners and a St. Louis developer reinvented the Ninth Square as a new-urbanist mixed-use district.

He returned to town full time determined to preserve the family’s history at 33 Crown. After winds from Superstorm Sandy tore off the roof, he rebuilt it, and worked on bailing out water that had gotten through the roof. He embarked on public art projects with neighborhood teens, trying to teach them about the positive applications of graffiti art on the side of the building. At the 100th anniversary celebration, he called for ​“100 more years.”

Now he’s scrambling under pressure to preserve all the artifacts he’s collected, physically move them, and make them available to the public at a different location. Not an easy feat for a collection that is so massive it ​“puts other local collections to shame,” according to Laura Clarke, president of the public-art advocacy group Site Projects | New Haven.

“My primary concern is for Greenberg’s New Haven exhibit, especially about finding a place where it can be moved so it won’t lose its magic and the tightly layered narrative that Greenberg has created,” she wrote in an email to the Independent Tuesday.

Moving that exhibit — and the thousands of objects that comprise it — is Robert Greenberg’s primary concern too. Amid his frantic work the other day, Greenberg paused by each object in the museum and ACME attic, where the elevator and 105 years of Greenberg family history sit side-by-side, recounting its significance.

He started with a display of objects from the now-departed Winchester Repeating Arms Company, now luxury lofts. Not far from his desk — the only part of the third floor that seems fully modern with its bright Mac desktop, stack of papers and and sleek, manicured workspace — sits a small case of still-sharp gunsmithing punches from the factory, now dormant after a busy life punching in the steel barrels of guns. Everything around them — the table on which they rest, a bronze bald eagle, its talons outstretched, several postcards and gun adverts from years past — is also from the factory, creating what he calls a material tableau that helps his viewers step back in time. A photo on a table of women toiling away on one of the factory’s expansive floors in their long dresses, helps reach the desired effect. The date: 1915.

Then there’s a section of the Lincoln Oak, decorated with newspaper clippings from periods that the tree lived to see. A few paces away, a large wood urn salvaged from the 1813 Center Church on the Green, blockaded by the British ships in the harbor during the war of 1812, that he intends to restore to its original condition for Center Church on the green. Glass cases filled with pottery that he has excavated from a New Haven sites over the past 10 years.

Behind that, shelves of glass test tubes, each daintily corked, that hold bits of stone, sand, and other rubble. Some, labeled ​“Horowitz,” hold tiny bits of rubble from the 2013 renovation of the Horowitz Brothers fabric shop into the Grove coworking space on Chapel Street.

That was just the surface, he said, pulling open a heavy door to reveal thousands of objects, stacked neatly on their shelves, that paid homage to members of his family, of the Ninth Square’s past, and of New Haven’s transition into the present. On one end of the room, glass soda bottles bearing New Haven’s name glinted proudly. On another, a signed picture from the late Mayor Biagio DiLieto, after Robert won a design contest to design to design the city sanitation vehicles. The image on those vehicles lasted on the trucks for 30 years

​“Look at this place,” he said, resting his hand on a jug that still smelled of molasses. ​“It’s a time capsule. I’ve been given a very valuable vision … The understanding of this story, that there are 370 years of history composited in New Haven.”

“I’ve built this,” he said of the collection and the histories that it invokes. ​“This history — it’s not just about the business. It’s about America.”

Elihu Rubin, a architectural historian and professor at Yale who brought his students to Robert Greenberg’s collection last week, said he urged Alan Greenberg to reconsider the sale during their visit.

“I think that on the one hand, it’d be wise to stay positive about the opportunity that the eviction affords to start using the collection more” in a new, more publicly accessible location, he said. ​“In many ways Rob’s collection is this incredible collection in search of a research question … It kind of does need to be rehoused — it’s so dense, that the space is just not usable. [A place] across the city and across different space — that would be terrific.”

But, he added, ​“in my mind, ACME represents an unquantifiable amount of value. To me it’s one of those buildings and institutions that represents that sense of place. The building crystallizes this tension in New Haven today and urban development more broadly … I hope that they’re able to yield a huge amount of exchange value. I worry that’s it’s going to be a paltry sum as compared to its use value. That’s hard to say.”

To listen to an interview with Robert Greenberg from ​“Dateline New Haven,” click on or download the above audio.