The newly rebuilt Q House, ready to reopen Saturday after 18 years.
Maya McFadden Photo
Jeanette Morrison and Henry Fernandez, leading a tour inside.
Seniors in the morning. Kids in the afternoon. Other adults at night.
That’s one way of looking at the planned rhythm of the newly rebuilt Dixwell Community “Q” House, which opens Saturday with a festive ribbon-cutting celebration of a decade of community working.
New Haveners from Dixwell and beyond have long awaited the revival of the Q House at 197 Dixwell Ave. since the original building closed in 2003. More than 1,000 RSVPs are in place for Saturday’s event.
Hundreds of personalized bricks at Q House entrance.
This reporter was given a tour of the newly renovated 5,000 square-foot center Wednesday by LEAP Executive Director Henry Fernandez, whose organization will run the programming there, and Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, the project’s champion.
As of this past Wednesday 352 bricks were laid at the center’s Dixwell Avenue entrance, each personalized with community names and messages of support. Each brick was purchased at $100 for the center’s first fundraiser.
“This is Dixwell’s safe place. Place to learn to navigate. And almost everything on Dixwell in one place,” Morrison said and Fernandez narrated the intended uses of each room. “This is our Schomburg Center in New Haven.”
The community space is made up of four separate units throughout building: the Stetson Library, the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, the Dixwell-Newhallville Senior Center, and the Q House proper. The Q House proper refers to the buildings programming areas for all users such as a gym, fitness room, dance studio, teaching kitchen, recording studio, and several conference rooms and community lounges. The on-site Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center currently remains under construction.
The four separate units all plan to operate separately while offering joint programming at times, Fernandez said.
For the past three weeks LEAP has been using the center’s programming spaces for its Afterschool Children’s Program and Leaders in Training Program. Its after-school program hosts 42 students and places them throughout the building for daily literacy activities and homework tutoring sessions, in conference rooms and in the gym. Its group of leaders in training include 25 15-year-olds who intern with the program to become junior counselors at age 16.
The Q House will be open daily from 9 a.m to 9 p.m., Morrison said. The senior center hours will run daily from around 9 a.m to 2 p.m. LEAP’s Dixwell site and additional partners will operate from 2 – 6 p.m for youth. And programs for other adults will run from 6 p.m to 9 p.m.
“We can’t mix everyone all the time, but we will have intergenerational gatherings at times,” Morrison said.
The Q will offer a permanent home to the Dixwell/Newhallville senior center, which has in the past had its programming travel among local churches when available.
The center’s commercial kitchen will host classes teaching community members how to run food businesses and get the necessary licenses. The goal is to begin offering courses in about two months or sooner, once the kitchen space is properly permitted by the city.
The center is looking to partner with food business nonprofit CitySeed, said Fernandez. “This entire thing will be focused on building economic power in Dixwell.”
The kitchen is equipped with multiple teaching tables, a fryer, grill, ovens, griddle, and ample refrigerator storage.
Morrison said she plans to explore the possibility of bringing the neighboring food pantry that operates out of the 26 Charles St. police substation to the Q House kitchen. “We can serve food right out the back door because it leads to the parking lot,” Morrison said.
The center has a recording studio that allows for advanced community music-making in its engineering space. The studio can fit about 20 people in it.
Community and staff offices, conference rooms, and lounges are built throughout the center. It also has a lounge, which Morrison promised to equip with a Playstation game system.
“I’ll be using it for SAT prep,” Fernandez quipped.
The community fitness room will be equipped with bikes, treadmills, leg machines, and weights.
When Morrison was elected alder in 2011, she organized a community meeting a month into her first term. She worked with community leaders to create a steering community to look into reopening the shuttered Q House.
She received support from then-Mayor Toni Harp and then-Gov. Dannel Malloy to demolish and rebuild the center. Architect duo Regina Winters and Kenneth Boroson designed the center, and building began in 2019.
At Saturday’s ribbon-cutting the center’s first exhibit will be on display in the Q’s Toni Nathaniel and Wendell Carl Harp Historical Museum.
On Wednesday artist and exhibit curator Frank Mitchell put up this exhibit. Called “Keeping the Faith,” it highlights a timeline of historical moments of “promises and persistence in Dixwell.”
On several display curtains Mitchell tells the story of “the neighborhood’s commitment to having a Q House” and “Connecticut’s significant activist and ministry presence that has been maintained throughout history.”
An art and game room is also included. The idea for a game room came to Morrison in a dream in the middle of the night. “I emailed [City Engineer] Giovanni [Zinn] at 12 a.m. saying, ‘Call me we have to have a game room,’” she recalled.
Morrison said the center needed a game room because the former Q House also did. “They say the Q House is the Q House because of the cue sticks for the pool table,” she said. “It’s not a Q House without the pool table,”
The game room also has an arcade game machine, ping pong table, and foosball table, per Fernandez’s special request.
“We used to get out of school and go to the arcade,” Morrison. “We want to pay homage to our roots.”
Also rooted in the Dixwell community is dance. Morrison recalled several dance academies and studios throughout Dixwell when the former Q House was operating. This led to the creation of a dance studio in the new building.
“To have dance in this building you’re supposed to, because we had dance on Dixwell,” Morrison said.
Dance lessons of all types will be taught to the community, including capoeira.
The dance studio overlooks the center’s grassy courtyard and paved space known as the Daniel Stewart Plaza, which will host farmers markets and local vendor pop-up shops. “We can even provide the space in our kitchen for businesses to prepare their food,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez and Morrison have an upcoming meeting with the family of the late Daniel Stewart to discuss how to continue commemorating his legacy.
The youth educational organization Sportsometry made use of the courtyard Wednesday. A net was set up for a lesson in which youth learned fractions while playing volleyball.
The senior center is equipped with a kitchen space and outdoor balcony overlooking East Rock. Fernandez plans to look into selling seats for the outdoor space during the Fourth of July for viewing of the holiday fireworks.
“We want to be able to take less and less from the city and make our own revenue,” Morrison said.
The center also plans to partner with local Dixwell churches and its neighbor Wexler Grant School for rental space and community programming. “The goal is to create something bigger than any of our entities can do on our own,” Fernandez said.
The final wing of the new Q includes a two-floor library equipped with an innovation studio, teen discovery lounge, reading lounge, computer area, and maker space. The relocated Stetson Library will be housed within the Q House after becoming the Dixwell community space for all types of programming when the Q House closed in 2003, Morrison said. “They took on almost everything that the Q House had so the community wouldn’t go without,” Morrison said. “Now we’re extending our arms wide open to them.”
The library, although not yet completely furnished Wednesday, includes a tutoring room and projectors for movie nights.
