New Daycare Center Comes To Old Rt. 34

A former parking lot stranded between MLK Boulevard and Legion Avenue in the Hill is now home to a 10,000 square-foot childcare center that uses a cast of anthropomorphic animal characters to teach toddlers everything from vocabulary to etiquette to yoga.

On Tuesday morning, Mayor Toni Harp, city Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson and 20 other city officials and neighborhood representatives celebrated the grand opening of the franchised daycare center and ​“early education academy, The Learning Experience, now located at 520 MLK Blvd.

The 10,000 square-foot building stands adjacent to Continuum of Care and Rite Aid, and is the latest new business to set up shop at the heart of a megablock bordered by MLK Boulevard, Legion Avenue, Dwight Street and Orchard Street that was once home to the Oak Street neighborhood before that community was razed in the 1950s during the era urban renewal.

Deepash and Shital Patel, the Glastonbury-based owners of the new Elm City childcare center, said that the center is open from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and will serve children ranging from six weeks old to eight years old with both curriculum-based daycare and after-school programs.

The center officially opened on Sept. 4 and currently has 30 enrolled students and 11 full-time teaching staff, and that the building has a capacity for 140 students around 35 full-time teachers. The married couple runs another Learning Experience daycare center in Cromwell, where they employ 35 teachers and serve 146 children.

“My roots come back to New Haven,” Deepash said, noting that his parents came from England to New Haven 25 years ago and started a now-closed hardware store on Whalley Avenue. Shital said that she too worked in Catholic charities in the Elm City for a decade before opening the childcare center in Cromwell and then deciding to open another one in New Haven.

Christina Rubino, regional manager for The Learning Experience, said that the daycare center’s educational curriculum uses a cast of anthropomorphic animal characters to teach kids math, reading, vocabulary, yoga, and even Chinese.

Those characters include Bubbles the Elephant, the center’s official mascot who focuses on reading; Lionstein, a bespectacled lion who teaches science and math; and Ping Panda, who teaches Mandarin vocabulary and Chinese cultural concepts to the center’s preschool students.

“This makes this a much more viable, working neighborhood,” Nemerson said about adding a childcare center so close to the employment hub that is the Yale-New Haven Hospital.

The daycare center’s opening marked the latest development to come from a 2014 Land Disposition Agreement (LDA) meant to reconnect sections of the city that were separated by Route 34 Connector mini-highway decades ago.

“Not only does it stitch parts of the city back together,” she said about new developments for the megablock. ​“It adds retail options, services, and eventually new housing to reinvigorate the Hill, West River, and Dwight neighborhoods.”

Nemerson and Harp said that the next development coming to the former island of parking lots could be a new 56-unit, low-income, multi-family apartment complex to be located on a 4.3 acre city-owned parcel at 16 Miller St., a grassy median strip by the Boulevard in between MLK/North Frontage and Legion.

On Aug. 29, a New York City-based developer called the NHP Foundation submitted an application to the city for a 17-year tax abatement agreement to build the new townhouse rentals pending the award of federal low income housing tax credits and other funding from the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA).

The proposal states that the complex will house a mix of one, two, and three-bedroom units that will rent at 25 to 80 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI).

Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of the press conference.