Group W Bench Ready To Change Hands

Group W Bench, the venerable Chapel Street head shop, art gallery, and psychedelic boutique that has operated continually in New Haven for 53 years, is in negotiations to be sold.

It’s not because of Covid-19. It’s not because the rent is too high. Health complications are part of the equation, but owner Raffael DiLauro has been contemplating the move for a long time.

DiLauro just had open heart surgery — more specifically, three operations in eight days — at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He is recuperating at home.

“The young people as well as the old people working there — their hearts are in it. That’s a pun, I guess,” he said.

He’d been thinking about selling well before he went to the hospital. He started thinking about it at the store’s 50-year anniversary, he said. Then ​“you just put it on the back burner, because you’ve done it half your life.” DiLauro said he already has a prospective buyer, he said. They’re in negotiations on a deal.

He is hopeful that the deal will go through — even as he’ll miss certain aspects of running the business.

“I’m going to miss all the people I buy from,” he said. Group W Bench gets its products — from Tibetan jewelry to American pipes — from artists and small companies. ​“Most of the people I met at shows. I’m going to miss that part a lot.”

DiLauro grew up in West Haven and worked in Columbus Auto Body, a shop in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood owned and run by his family. He joined the National Guard, but ​“I couldn’t handle being in the National Guard,” he said.

“I met somebody from the resistance group” inside the Guard. ​“I met him because he was going the wrong way down a one-way street.” This man referred DiLauro to a ​“shrink” who got him out of the Guard. He went to art school at L.A. Art Center in 1966. In 1967 he went to San Francisco and checked out the scene in Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury.

“Berkeley in the ​‘60s? Incredible. I just wish I took more photos,” he said. ​“The head shops there were stunning. They were magical.” They gave him the idea of opening up a head shop of his own.

“I’m definitely rooted in the ​‘60s, and I’m glad of it,” he said. ​“We had the music and the power. And we had the draft, and we had Nixon. You think about how we have crazy times now — we had crazy times then, too.”

He decided to return to New Haven. ​“I wanted to open up a shop and do artwork,” he said, ​“and make pipes.”

Group W Bench’s first location, opened in 1968, was at 906 1/2 Howard Ave. ​“We opened up the shop, and it had no name, really,” DiLauro said. ​“I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just had my artwork there, and I wanted to get out of the house. I was working in my dad’s shop and was getting tired of working ball joints.”

The monthly rent was $65. ​“We lasted for a short while,” he said. ​“The neighbors complained about us being hippies.” His landlord was a judge, but ​“he never gave us our day in court,” DiLauro said. ​“We just had to leave.”

He moved the shop to Edgewood Avenue and Dwight Street. ​“We paid $125 a month for that place,” he said. ​“It had no insulation. It had a giant furnace that was like an octopus. We used to put incense in it.”

On Trial

DiLauro at the time had an encounter with Julian Beck: ​“He came in my shop and invited me to come and see a performance of the Living Theater,” the oldest anarchist theater company in the United States. DiLauro showed up at the production, hosted by the Yale Dramatic Association, with an ​“entourage,” he said: his brother, a couple women, and two friends named J.R. and Crazy Tom.

Beck, as it turned out, put them onstage. ​“All of a sudden these people start coming in — the audience — and these people come on stage and they’re half-naked, and they create a totem pole” from their bodies, DiLauro said. ​“Julian put his hands on my knees and just stared in my face.”

The performance ​“ended up on the street and the cops shut it down.”

At the Edgewood location, ​“we were getting constantly broken into,” DiLauro said. ​“Next door was a beautiful park. I got a dog for protection, but the neighbors complained.” The dog created a nuisance, the case escalated, and DiLauro ended up going to jail

“My day in court, George Johnson” — who would represent Warren Kimbro in the Black Panther trials a couple years later — ​“was my lawyer.”

The judge threw out the case.

“George sent me an invoice for $200. I sent him a check and it bounced,” DiLauro said. ​“He said, ​‘Don’t worry about it.’” But DiLauro paid him.

Meanwhile, a friend knew about a place on Chapel Street that was opening up. The rent there was $200 a month. On one side was a barber. On the other was a tailor.

Group W Bench moved there — to its current location — in 1969, ​“just after Yale let women in,” DiLauro noted.

DiLauro did leave the business for a few days to attend Woodstock when his brother got tickets.

“I don’t even remember who I left the store with,” DiLauro said.

They drove to the festival in an Econoline with a few gallons of water and a little refrigerator. ​“We got there, we had no idea what was going on. None,” DiLauro said. ​“We didn’t know there was a mob scene because we were there early.”

As owner of one of the few head shops around, DiLauro said, he felt plugged into the counterculture of the time, serving as a hub for the area.

“We were informed. We got things from Fillmore West and Zap Comics. It was pretty exciting,” he said.

He was also doing good business. When the tailor left, a yarn shop moved in next door. When that moved out, he took over the rent on that space and ​“busted out the wall” between the shops.

“I just had so much energy,” DiLauro said.

He discovered the yarn store had painted the floor black and white, just like he had at the space next to it, so when he removed the wall, the floors matched. ​“So, you never know,” he said.

Three Hotels Later …

Group W Bench has now been a fixture on the block for five decades.

“Three hotels next door to me came and went,” DiLauro said. The shop has had well-known customers stop by. ​“Muddy Waters came in the shop. He was quiet. He was probably wondering what the hell he was doing there,” DiLauro said. Other visitors included Julia Roberts, Jack White, and George Clinton, who bought ​“a couple pipes made out of toy cars,” DiLauro said with a laugh.

DiLauro even ​“ended up going on tour with Arlo Guthrie,” he said; the name ​“Group W Bench” is taken from a line in Guthrie’s epic song ​“Alice’s Restaurant,” relating the tragicomedy of an ill-fated attempt to drop off a load of garbage at the town dump on Thanksgiving and the consequences thereof. They went to Switzerland and Germany ​“just before the wall came down,” DiLauro said. ​“They’d want to hear him sing ​‘Alice’s Restaurant’ all the time. We were like, ​‘Jeez, not again.’” Never saw him again after that.

But DiLauro values his steady business the most. ​“We’ve had three generations shopping,” he said. ​“The store’s like a little magnet somehow.” He recalled a younger customer who described coming to Group W Bench as ​“kind of like going to church.” The customer explained that ​“my mom would take me and that’s how I felt,” DiLauro recalled.

Maybe, he reasoned, it was the incense.

The store is also something of a sanctuary for DiLauro as well. ​“It’s like an inner peace” when he’s in the store by himself after business hours. ​“The store would be closed and the lights were on. It’s good to have a place like that. And at the same time, it’s your living.”

In the early 1970s, he recalled, ​“you would go to these big craft fairs. Artists would bring what they were working on. It would be like the Renaissance. We used to camp out there.” DiLauro would bring his kids. ​“That’s where a lot of the sculpture came from,” he said. Other crafts came from shows in New York City that occupied a couple floors of a couple hotels. ​“Each hotel had its own bar scene going, and one room sold jewelry and another sold T shirts.”

DiLauro trusted his instincts for stocking his store. ​“I was a quick buyer. I never hesitated. If I liked it, I’d buy it,” he said. The pipes on sale ​“came from little sources in New York — hidden gems.” But ​“they were all American crafters…. I had one crafter who was in my cellar making jewelry.”

Today those crafts fair happen in the Javits Center, a vast conference space in New York City. ​“Everything changes,” he said. Some of the artisans he worked with for years, like a beloved candlemaker, have died. ​“That happens, if you’re around long enough.”

He notices changes downtown (“Yale has gentrified New Haven,” he said). He misses Margaret Holloway, the Shakespeare Lady, who died of Covid-19 in June. Before the pandemic and its related shutdowns, he saw the wave of new restaurants opening in New Haven.

But ​“I don’t feel the change,” he said. ​“I guess I’m just so busy. I’m busy running the shop and doing our thing,” he added. ​“I still don’t own a cell phone. During this Covid thing, I almost broke down and got one, because if I broke down somewhere, no one wants to stop,” he said with a laugh. ​“I look out of my eyes and I still feel 24 years old — until I look in the mirror.”

“I was lucky. We got to see a lot of America. It was a renaissance in crafts, a renaissance in music. I was lucky to be there,” he said. He related calling a friend on the West Coast who he had gone to art school with. ​“I said, ​‘I’m thinking of selling,’” he recalled. His friend offered an observation. Group W Bench, he said, was ​“pretty unusual. So unique! How often does something like that come up” for sale? He saw that reflected in people’s reaction to the notice he was selling. ​“People said ​“that’s something I’ve always wanted to do — have a store in the community,’” he said. ​“The shop owners are the protection of New Haven because they’re always out there protecting the front. It’s good to have shop owners.”

The Last Mile

Group W Bench closed along with every other non-essential business this spring at the beginning of the pandemic, then reopened as soon as possible. ​“We have masks at the store. We also sell a few. But you got to have a mask to come in,” DiLauro said. The store also limits the number of people who can be in the store at one time — something that has become an issue, as DiLauro limited the hours the store was open.

“We cut the hours to 20” per week, DiLauro said. ​“I said, ​‘Actually, it works out fine.’ I like to sleep in!”

But over the weeks since reopening he saw ​“we were making as well as we did when we worked 40 hours. People just showed up. They were tired of being locked in.”

Group W Bench was doing fine. But DiLauro still felt a desire to back away. ​“I have to make a choice — how much more can I do?” he said. So, on Sept. 27, he announced that the store was for sale.

And the prospective buyer emerged. ​“We haven’t worked out the details yet,” he said.

After his surgeries, DiLauro is feeling like he’s recovering steadily.

Doctors have given him a good prognosis. ​“I got another 100,000 miles,” he said. ​“If this works out, I still be a small part of it, and that’ll be good,” he said about the sale of Group W Bench.

But, he added, ​“as soon as I can start hugging my grandkids again, that’ll be better.”