A Fair Havener who turned around his life, then turned around his neighborhood, is buying up six properties within a two-block radius in his neighborhood’s main commercial strip. He hopes to build a Latino version of Wooster Street.
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Look at those scruffy guys hanging out in the liquor store lot. Angelo Reyes just knows a drug deal is going on. He feels qualified to judge; a lifetime ago, he sold drugs in Fair Haven. That was before he went to jail, before a white-collar inmate schooled him in the world of mortgage financing, before he returned to the neighborhood where he grew up, rebuilt dozens of trashed houses, and helped working families figure out how to buy them so they wouldn’t have to pay more money to rent from absentee landlords.
Reyes is also sure these guys in the parking lot come from suburban East Haven. How does he know? He just knows, he says. He remembers who his customers used to be. Nowadays he takes down their license plates and “urges” them to stay out of his neighborhood, to buy their drugs and hire their hookers in their own town.
“We say, —ÀúGo back to East Haven to do your crap.’ They feel they can intimidate the kids with five dollars and then call us the crap.”
“After the 30th,” Reyes adds, “that won’t happen here.”
That’s because on the 30th—”Sept. 30th-”-Reyes expects to close on the building that houses the package store where these guys shop and congregate. He plans to evict the liquor store. He plans to evict what he calls a rowdy social club upstairs. He plans to keep the Expressions clothing store, but he wants to move it down the block. To one of the other buildings he’s buying.
Reyes is on a spree. He has bought and renovated, or is in the process of buying, six major pieces of property all within a two-block radius of the commercial crossroads of Grand Avenue and Ferry Street. He has grand plans for Grand, a scrappy but increasingly thriving row of immigrant-run shops that mirror the immigrant shops that first brought bustle to the area a century ago.
Back then the immigrants came from Eastern Europe. They spoke Yiddish. Today’s bodega and marqueta proprietors come from Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Colombia, Puerto Rico. They speak Spanish.
Reyes says it’s time for Latinos not just to rent and shop, but to take ownership. And invest in that extra level of care and sparkle that require committed local owners.
“What Wooster Street is to Italians, a portion of Grand Avenue should be to Hispanics,” Reyes, who’s 40, says during a tour of his new domain. He feels so at home here that he leaves the engine running and the doors unlocked to his green Chevy pick-up truck as he strolls around the corner for a half hour. The truck’s still there humming when he returns.
“It can’t start with someone bringing in a $10 million project. It has to come from us.”
When Reyes mentions Wooster Street, he imagines brick work on restored buildings, copper fixtures, blue stone shingles. He imagines crowds visiting from out of town for a fun, safe, colorful, “ethnic” experience.
Grand already draws outsiders who know about its funky mix of shops or have an interest in Latino commerce. Some restaurants have developed reputations: El Charro for Mexican specialties, El Coqui for Spanish dishes, Porky’s Cafe for its mofongo, a popular plaintain dish from Puerto Rico. Grand serves its homegrown clientele most of all; Latin American immigrants are the fastest-growing population in town. Hailing from different nations, they have specialized needs. For instance, the C Town supermarket at Ferry and Grand stocks produce and packaged goods from a variety of Latin American nations. Yet a smaller food store, La Super Marqueta, is able to stay in business just two blocks away by focusing on Mexican and Guatemalan specialties.
For all its bustle, much of the district remains scruffy. It has problem businesses and absentee landlords without enough of a stake in the district or enough of a presence to shoo troublemakers from their premises, especially after hours. Crime keeps people away.
That’s what Reyes wants to change. He is always around, and he knows the turf; he has what you might call street capital. Financial capital is tougher to obtain. He rarely gets far seeking business from conventional banks like NewAlliance. He has to hustle for lenders who charge more interest; he works a few properties at a time, then uses the proceeds to start on new buildings. The strategy has worked well in the seven years he has built up his business, stabilizing the residential area around eastern Lombard Street in the process. It means he has to hustle more than the next guy. It means he keeps his imagination, like his truck engine, constantly running.
It also means taking risks. He put up his family’s house and his thriving People’s Laundromat on Lombard as collateral for his new Grand Avenue project. “I believe in what I do,” he says. “You know how I feel about Fair Haven. For everything I did wrong [as a youth], I’m planting flowers.”
Positive Thinking
Reyes’ plan calls for keeping away “negative” businesses like liquor stores and loud clubs. He wants professional offices, family restaurants. He offers a building-by-building rundown of the properties he’s acquiring through an LLC called ALR Properties Grand Avenue.
√¢—? 229 Grand: That’s the two-story building housing the package store and social club. Reyes is considering opening a second laundromat there.
√¢—? 235 Grand. Reyes already owns it. He brought a New Haven branch of the Spanish American Merchants Association (SAMA) there. The group has helped Latino entrepreneurs open businesses in the neighborhood. The building also includes offices of Mutual Housing, a not-for-profit affordable-housing developer.
√¢—? 280 Poplar, a few steps in from Grand. Silver Moon Distributors, which sells religious items, is there. The owners plan to retire and shut down the business. Reyes wants to replace it with a family-oriented restaurant and perhaps an agency that trains moms to run day care centers out of their homes. Reyes has the building on deposit.
√¢—? 251 Grand, at the corner of Poplar. It has four storefronts and upstairs apartments, which Reyes plans to renovate. Riverside Cleaners, one of the first-floor tenants, will move to a Reyes-owned building in another part of Fair Haven, Reyes says. He plans to renovate apartments on the neglected second floor. He’s thinking of moving Expressions to the first-floor space; he’d like to lure D’Amato’s Seafood to relocate from the middle of the block. A tax office and/or an ice cream shop would also fit into the plan. This building’s on deposit, too.
√¢—? 238-244 Grand, a stretch of four storefronts across the street. Reyes already owns this building. He’s putting in copper awnings, a slate roof, and night lighting. He’s trying to lure a Latino eye doctor from Hartford to two of the storefronts to open an office as well as a business making glasses. Somewhere among the properties he hopes to find an indoor winter space for the fruit seller and the fruit-ice guy who have carts on the sidewalk in nice weather.
√¢—? 233 Blatchley, right around the corner. That’s the gem so far in Reye’s new collection of properties. He’s been restoring the 120-plus-year-old brick building. He added rosettes to a newly built porch. He put yellow pine floors inside. “Every brick from the bottom up has been brought to life,” he says. Architect Regina Winters (yep, who also heads the city housing authority) has an office on one floor. A Costa Rican-born chiropractor just moved her office to the first floor from West Haven, with the help of SAMA. The doctor, Thezlay Alpizar-Diaz, says she wanted to be closer to the Latino community. “There’s a deficit of Spanish-speaking doctors in this area,” she says.
Some people would say Grand Avenue is already a success story. Reyes agrees it has come far. He believes it has only begun to realize its potential. “Grand Avenue is stable,” he says. “It still hasn’t awoken.”