Scores, looking down Saint John Street.
Thomas Breen photos
Attorneys DiCrosta and Lawlor in housing court.
New owners of a former clock factory on the industrial “Mill River” side of Wooster Square have moved to evict a nearly two-decade-old strip club as they prepare to convert the complex into 130 low-income housing units and artist lofts.
On Aug. 7, the new owners, Taom Heritage New Haven LLC, the holding company for the Portland, Oregon-based developers of the Clock Shop Lofts apartment complex at 133 Hamilton St., filed a motion to evict Peter Forchetti and Fuun House Productions LLC.
Forchetti and Fuun House are the owners of the Scores strip club at 85 Saint John St.
CROSSKEY ARCHITECTS
Rendering of future Clock Shop Lofts.
The club has been based out of the Saint John Street address under various different business names since 2002. It currently occupies roughly 14,000 square-feet of street-level commercial space on the southern side of the 130,000 square-foot Hamilton Street former industrial complex.
In 2013 the local strip club, then called the Key Club, was the scene of a shoot-out that left one woman dead and five people injured.
Taom states in court papers that the tenants’ lease has expired, and that it’s now time for them to go.
Scores strip club at 85 Saint John St.
“The Month-to-Month Lease for the month of July expired by lapse of time,” Taom’s lawyer Jay Lawlor wrote in an Oct. 12 amended complaint submitted to Superior Court Judge John Louis Cordani.
“We are confident we will prevail,” said Josh Blevins, the Clock Shop Lofts developer’s director of historic redevelopment and government affairs. He said that Scores is the only remaining tenant still occupying the building.
Beyond that, he said, he declined to comment any further on pending litigation.
The defendants have not yet submitted a substantive response to Taom’s initial or amended complaint. Forchetti could not be reached for comment by the publication time of this article.
According to the online court docket, the defendants and their lawyer Anthony DiCrosta have for close to three months parried the plaintiff’s attempted eviction with various procedural objections.
In his Oct. 12 amended complaint, Lawlor wrote that Fuun House Productions’s lease of the 85 Saint John St. space expired on March 31, 2017.
“Following the expiration of the Lease,” he wrote, “the Defendants remained in possession of the Premises.” According to the lease, he wrote, Fuun House’s continued operation of Scores after the lease had expired automatically defaulted the tenant into a month-to-month relationship with the landlord, whereby the landlord could terminate the occupant’s use of the property at any given month.
The Clock Shop Lofts site, viewed from Hamilton Street.
“On July 31, 2018,” Lawlor wrote, “the Plaintiff caused a notice to quit to be duly served on the Defendants to quit possession of the Premises on or before August 6, 2018 as required by law.”
But after Aug. 6, Taom’s lawyer wrote, Fuun House Productions and Forchetti simply never left.
In response, Fuun House’s lawyer DiCrosta has filed a motion to dismiss and an objection to the amended complaint on technical grounds.
In the city’s third-floor housing court at 121 Elm St. on Tuesday morning, Judge Cordani formally dismissed DiCrosta’s objections, and ruled that Forcetti and Fuun House Productions must file a valid legal response to Taom’s eviction lawsuit within the next five days.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Former nightlcub booking agent Dimitri Rimsky surveys the debris left behind at the current Clock Shop factory complex during a June visit.