Ghosts Slip Into Old Clock Factory

More than half a century after the New Haven Clock Factory closed, the images of long-gone workers on the factory floor and the artists who squatted there after the machines fell silent appeared on the crumbling walls.

A group of Yale architecture students set up a temporary art installation inside of 133 Hamilton St., intending to re-conjure memories of the property’s past within its present — as a plan to redevelop the former factory slowly moves forward.

Current owner Rosanne Yagovane showed up to the installation. She is working with Bill Kraus, a historic rehabilitation consultant, on a more permanent new look for the factory. They’re seeking a developer who will want to conserve the property’s history while giving it a greater use for the local community.

Helen Rosenberg, the point person for the project in the city’s office of economic development, said Kraus and Yagovane are negotiating with someone who might want to buy and develop the old factory. ​“If it doesn’t work out, we’ll definitely be looking for others,” she said.

Cut off from the rest of the city by Interstate 91 during the city’s period of urban renewal, the property is in a former industrial stretch across the highway from Wooster Square. The building has deteriorated over the last several decades as plans for its redevelopment failed to come to fruition.

In 2015, the state gave New Haven $200,000 to study what it would take to clean up the polluted site and redevelop it, as part of a $7 million series of statewide “brownfield remediation” grants. A 1999 study showed no major environmental red flags, Rosenberg said. But this environmental study will go into more detail, and consultants Fuss & O’Neill are expected to report back next week.

Crosskey Architects has started examining the structure of the building to explore “different layouts for the proposed options for redevelopment,” Rosenberg said. And another contractor is working to draft an application to get the property onto the National Register of Historic Places, which would allow a future developer to apply for tax credits, she said.

After the factory closed in 1960, the property at Hamilton and St. John Streets became a site for off-the-grid housing, work and play. It hosted artists who lived and created within the otherwise vacant space, regular Yale Art and Architecture School “Sex Balls,” well-attended R&B and death metal concerts, a biker bar and a series of strip clubs. Yagovane’s family bought the building in 1987.

Dante Furioso and several master’s students in the School of Architecture mined some of that history and set up installations the other day in a few rooms in the hollowed structure, which still hosts some of the remains of its past exploits.

Several signs of 1990s notorious biker gang Bad Ass White Boys (or ​“B.A.W.B.”) remain — including an orange decal behind the bar and panels of colorful graffiti leaning against a rotting wall. Kraus found copies of the gang’s bylaws in one of the building’s many rooms, which urged members to respect one another, not show up to meetings drunk, and clean the weight room after use.

The students projected images into the darkness on walls of a room two deep past the bar. They showed photos of artist Dimitry Rimsky, who formed an arts collaborative centered in the factory in the 1980s. He used the property as inspiration for his work and re-purposed parts of the building as physical props.

Yagovane said she enjoyed seeing the students bringing ​“life” into the building. Her father Tony, who left the building to her after he died, ​“always liked to do things with Yale,” she said. ​“It’s continuing a tradition.”

Furioso said the factory was a good case study for the seminar’s focus on ​“ghost” or abandoned spaces, as representative of urban decline.

“After the clocks went away, the building had phases of afterlives” each with different ​“levels of formality,” in the way they were recognized as legitimate by city agencies, said the seminar’s professor, Elihu Rubin.

The projections of the images are a way of interacting with the memories of the spaces.

“We’re projecting things that had been in the space back into the physical space itself,” Rubin said.

Another room featured remnants of the building’s past as a concert venue and showcase for adult entertainment. Performers passing through the building on their tours throughout the country would write notes to one another on the walls in permanent marker.

Some wrote greetings to specific people; others reached out to those who would soon take their places.

“They were communicating to each other across time,” Rubin said.