Politics, Progress Mix At Q House Launch

With a high school dance team to her right, a dozen alders and city officials to her left, and an excavator busy tearing up concrete behind her, Mayor Toni Harp led a Q House construction press conference that was equal parts progress and politics less than a week before a hotly contested primary.

Harp served as the emcee and featured speaker for Wednesday’s midday event, which brought out around 40 Dixwell community advocates and city officials to the vacant plot of ground across from Dixwell Plaza where construction has finally begun on a new Q House community center.

It wasn’t officially a ​“groundbreaking.” Although a new contractor did break ground this week — unlike two years ago, when the official ​“groundbreaking” took place.

The old Dixwell Community ​“Q” House, shuttered in 2003, once stood on the same spot where the crowd gathered Wednesday.

A new long-in-the-works replacement Q House, a planned 54,000 square-foot, two-story building that will house the Stetson Library, the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, the Dixwell Senior Center, and a new basketball court and recording studio, among other amenities, is now being built just a few feet over at the corner of Dixwell Avenue and Foote Street.

Just last week, the mayor signed an agreement with the project’s construction contractor, A. Secondino & Son, to oversee construction on the $16.697 million mostly state-funded venture.

“Construction of the new Q House on this site embodies the hope that we all share,” Harp said, earning frequent bursts of applause from the crowd and speaking after a dance and percussion performance from the Hillhouse High School dance team. ​“There’s no question that the construction activity on the site behind us has been a collective wish and subject of eager anticipation for the past many, many years.”

The 40-minute victory lap presser came just six days before Sept. 10’s Democratic mayoral primary, in which Harp is seeking to fend off a challenge from former East Rock/Cedar Hill Alder Justin Elicker.

The event also came less than two years after Harp, Dixwell Alder Jeannette Morrison, and nearly the same host of city officials stood at that same spot for a celebratory commemorative ​“groundbreaking” for the planned new building in November 2017, just days before the last municipal election.

During the event, Morrison, a leader of the Q House rebuild push, implored an eager crowd to support Harp next Tuesday

“Please vote for Mayor Toni Harp,” she said, ​“because she’s in this seat, she understands our needs, and she has prioritized the Q House just as well as police and fire and jobs.”

Elicker, in a statement released before Wednesday’s event, criticized the presser as purely political.

“In 2017, just before the last election,” he wrote in an email statement, ​“Mayor Harp held a groundbreaking for the Q House. Two years later and six days before this election, Mayor Harp is holding another groundbreaking for the Q House. It’s been six years since Mayor Harp promised the community a new Q House. Meanwhile we’ve wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on another youth center that never opened its doors and is the subject of an FBI investigation. As I knock on doors around the city, I hear from so many residents that want more after school and summer programming for our young people — work we could have initiated long ago if the Harp administration had managed these projects well. The people of New Haven deserve a mayor that can get the job done.”

How Project Evolved Since 2017

Amid the pageantry was genuine news of the hard-won progress on the construction of an expensive community project with a diversity of local and state funding sources and a half-dozen different prospective tenants.

Harp explained exactly how much behind-the-scenes work has gone into the Q House project since the 2017 event, and why the delayed project now finally appears to be about to be built.

The original architect for the new building, Regina Winters, passed away as she was designing the new Q House, Harp said. Her passing took place before the 2017 presser; the city’s acquisition of the unfinished designs from Winters’ estate through probate court took longer than expected.

Those designs were only two-thirds complete, Harp said. So Winters’ partner, local architect Ken Boroson, had to finish the design.

Then those designs went to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, who had to make sure that they were complete and that there were appropriate, accompanying construction documents before going out to bid.

As the city went out to bid, the local library decided that it wanted the Stetson branch slated for the new Q to be ​“state of the art,” she said. So officials reached out to the Connecticut Library, and secured a $1 million grant on top of the roughly $15 million state bonding Harp had helped win for the overall Q House from former Gov. Dannel Malloy.

The library then embarked on a $2 million community fundraising campaign to raise even more funds to help sustain a new Stetson, a fundraising drive that the library and the Dixwell community have nearly completed. Lauren Bisio, the library foundation’s director of Advancement, told the Independent on Thursday that the library has raised $1.75 million out of that $2 million goal.

“Then we discovered that Cornell Scott Hill Health Center wanted to move everything over across the street,” Harp said. So the city had to update the designs accordingly to accommodate a new 13,000 square-foot space for the community health center.

After that redesign was done, the city submitted all of its plans to the state Department of Administrative Services and state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) and state library, all of which had to sign off on the project. And, whenever three different state bureaucracies get involved, that inevitably takes some time.

“It just took a while,” she said. ​“While we had the money for a long period of time for the initial project, as it grew, and as we got more and more funding from diff departments, it took a long time to go through that entire process. And so here we are today, and thankful to everyone that you didn’t give up hope. That you believed us when we said we were going to build it, even though you couldn’t see it, and all these things were happening behind the scenes.”

18 Months

Zinn took the mic and explained that construction indeed has now begun. The whole project should take around 18 months to finish.

This week, the contractor started clearing the site of some of the existing concrete sidewalks.

Next week, they’ll start removing contaminated soils leftover from a former car service center on the site.

“Then we transition into foundation work,” he said, with the installation of 600 rammed aggregate piers: 10 to 15-foot tall stone columns inserted underground in order to improve the strength of the soil. That should take around three weeks.

Then excavation, tying rebar, poring concrete, subfloor piping and slab, and the rest of the construction, the latter of which should begin at the end of this winter and last all next year.

There are still many subcontracting opportunities available for the project, Zinn said, particularly for the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center section, for which the city will be contracting directly with small and women-owned and minority-owned businesses. Anyone interested in applying for the work should reach out directly to the Small Contractor Development Program staff.

Correction: The Stetson Library: The Next Chapter fundraising drive has raised $1.75 million out of its $2 million fundraising campaign. Learn more about the fundraising drive here.

And that is different from the Q House ​“Buy a Brick” campaign, another fundraising drive for the site. Learn more about here. The bricks will be laid at the entry to the finished building.

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