“They’ve Got To Gut Everything”

Lounge chairs covered in dust. A scraped wooden dance floor. A hulking bar the shape of a boat. And a broken down kitchen stocked with one last bottle of anisette.

Parking commissioners found those dance-club relics as they toured the vacant Crown Street Garage commercial space, slated to become New Haven’s next hot spot music venue.

The tour was part of a special meeting that the New Haven Parking Authority held at 4 p.m. Friday to discuss the latest in lease negotiations with the New Haven Center for the Performing Arts (NHCPA), the nonprofit that owns the College Street Music Hall across the street.

Two months ago, NHCPA emerged on top in a months-long competition to lease the cavernous, 10,000-square-foot, publicly-owned commercial space, which was built in 1974. The nonprofit plans to turn the space, which used to house the Alchemy night club, into a 450-to-900-person-capacity music venue. NHCPA’s proposal indicates that it will pour $2 million into renovating the space, and that the demolition and construction work should take just months to complete.

“There’s nothing here,” marveled parking authority Commissioner Larry Stewart as he toured the empty space on Friday.

“They’ve got to gut everything,” authority Director of Planning and Engineering James Staniewicz said, thinking through just how much work will be required to convert the space into a usable form again.

NHCPA President Keith Mahler did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.

Parking authority Acting Executive Director Doug Hausladen had initially planned for the group to spend the hour in executive session, discussing the details of a draft lease that the authority plans to send over to NHCPA. But the commissioners had neither a completed draft lease to review nor any draft design drawings from NHCPA. So they decided instead to devote most of their 45-minute Friday meeting to touring the derelict, soon-to-be-rehabilitated space at the corner of Crown Street and College Street.

Hausladen, Staniewicz, Stewart, Parking Authority Commissioner Donna Curran, Parking Authority Chief Financial Officer Brian Seholm, and Parking Authority Chief Operating Officer Sammy Parry circled the venue’s exterior in the freezing afternoon cold.

Staniewicz said the new club’s entrance will likely be on College Street near the corner of Crown Street, where one of the facade’s venue’s five current doors is located.

Hausladen said the music hall owners can recommend changes to any of the cream-colored exterior walls, including the many tall, black windows that dot the Crown Street-facing facade.

“A little facade improvement goes a long way,” he said. Looking up at a second-floor window open to the elements, Staniewicz said, ​“They’ve got a little buttoning up to do.”

Behind the parking garage ramp, Hausladen led the way to a back entrance near a fenced in set of dumpsters. He said the authority is working with the Town Green Special Services District to set up a trash compactor. He added that the music hall owners will have to remove a long, metallic duct that still stretching from the old club’s kitchen across the first-level ceiling of the garage.

As the group entered the old club’s dark and dusty interior, Stewart recalled that this space was the first bar he ever went to upon moving from Baltimore to New Haven in 1980. Nearly four decades later, he recalled that soon after he entered the bar (a jazz club called Clarence’s Court Jester), which then catered primarily to African Americans, he ran into a childhood friend from Baltimore.

On Friday afternoon, there were no childhood friends or any other signs of life to be seen in the dank and dusty club space. Hausladen led the way with a flashlight, while the rest of the commissioners used lights from their cellphones.

Still coated in bright purple and yellow paint, the room at the corner of College and Crown is anchored by a trapezoidal bar holding just a hat that reads, ​“Show Me Your Shamrocks.”

Moving over to the old dance room, Staniewicz and Stewart spoke about how the music hall owners will have to clean out all of the old furniture and design fixtures, and gut and remediate the old club space. They speculated that the club’s caulking may contain asbestos.

“If they did work in the 1990s,” Stewart said, ​“there may not be any environmental remediation” necessary.

He guessed that the clean up and renovation may wind up costing between $300 and $400 per square foot.

“For a while, this was the place to be,” Staniewicz recalled as he looked out at the empty dance floor, still presided over by a disco ball that glinted faintly with every passing flashlight beam. When the venue was the oldies dance club Boppers in the late 1980s and 1990s, he said, the free Friday night buffet was one of the more popular attractions on the block.

Hausladen and Staniewicz said that the parking authority, as the landlords of the property, will leave code enforcement to the fire department, the Building Department, the police department, and other relevant city agencies.

“We’re just reviewing how it [the new proposed club] affects our operations” of the Crown Street Garage, Staniewicz said.

Now that the music hall owners have had a few opportunities to visit the empty club space, Hausladen said, the parking authority commissioners expect to receive draft design documents for the proposed new music venue within the next week or two. The commissioners will then send along a draft lease, and the negotiations will proceed from there, he said.

He said the authority does not yet know how much it plans to ask the music hall owners to pay per square foot for the lease. The authority’s Request for Proposal (RFP) for the project listed the minimum monthly rent to be $6‑per-square-foot triple net.