Lucy Gellman Photo
Game Day on Chapel Street.
Two communal Chapel Street businesses are preparing to pack up, reassess, and move on by the end of the month. But a new round is in the cards for downtown’s game-playing scene.
The two businesses are Happiness Lab at the Grove and Elm City Games, the latter of which sublets from Happiness Lab owner Vishal Patel, who sublets from The Grove.
After the rental space at 756 Chapel St. changed hands from Olympia Properties to New York based real estate firm East River Partners, LLC last month, Patel has decided to move out, leaving Elm City Games looking for a new home.
An [Un]happy Life On Chapel?
Last call at 756 Chapel.
The reasons behind the hip hangout‘s departure — which has also led to a diplomatic parting of ways for Patel and Elm City Games co-owners Matt Fantastic and Trish Loter — are more complicated than climbing rents. Only Happiness Lab will be leaving downtown: Elm City Games plans to branch off on its own, and is exploring locations on Chapel Street and in the Ninth Square.
For Patel, the owner of Happiness Lab locations downtown and on Whalley Avenue in Westville, East River Partners’ purchase of the building didn’t originally signal a need to move on after a year and nine months in the space, his first brick-and-mortar home for A Happy Life coffee, which he sublets from The Grove owner Slate Ballard. The rent was rising — from $4,500 a month to around $4,700 a month for 2,000 square feet — but he felt that he could afford his share of it, he said in an interview Thursday morning.
Of $,4500, Elm City Games’ sublet covered about two-thirds of the monthly rent.
But he wanted to stay because the Chapel Street space factored into a bigger plan. In the fall, he received a loan for $50,000 from Start Community Bank for an incubator kitchen in one of the building’s back rooms. He talked to East River Partners and found that they were on board with it, he said.
Patel.
Until he suggested that the real estate firm, whose reach extends to The Grove, might need to absorb a few months of rent while he closed down Happiness Lab, and worked on building out the kitchen. It was an idea to which they’d been initially receptive, he said. But in a conference call at the beginning of December, they told Patel that plan was a no-go. He could build the kitchen, but he’d have to pay rent too. And Patel decided it was time to leave.
“I was ready to go [ahead with the kitchen] in October,” he said. “And then this happened.” Now, he is preparing to return the loan and pack up the Happiness Lab on short notice. The coffeeshop’s last day in business is Dec. 23rd, when it will close at 3 p.m. for the last time on Chapel.
East River Partners Vice President Alex Mejean did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Independent. As of Friday morning, East River Partners had also not followed up with a requested statement on what it plans to do with the property.
Patel, who piloted the idea for his coffee startup two years ago through Project Storefronts, doesn’t see this departure as entirely a bad thing. As a business owner, he’d been feeling restless for some time. The coffeeshop was losing money. He had a growing sense that he’d gotten too far from what first turned him onto coffee — the thought of ethically sourcing and importing beans, and working more directly with coffee farmers. He missed having the travel time to visit coffee farms, as he had three times in Tanzania. And while he loved the idea of an incubator kitchen, he could see placing it on the back burner, and waiting to see if the city did something similar.
“I decided to make coffee part of my life,” he said Thursday. “That was always the goal. But now I think I might try some new entrepreneurial things.”
He added of the Westville Happiness Lab, located inside Lotta Studios, that “I might be ready to hand it off” soon.
The Game Must Go On
For Fantastic and Loter (pictured), a hectic transition out of 756 Chapel St. — as the sub-subletters, they are not able to stay — has meant snapping into full-efficiency mode. While the two had been talking about moving into a new gaming space since July of this year — they wanted a bar, a better kitchen, and more room to expand their operation — they were not expecting to do so until early into next year. When early 2017 became late December 2016, the two started scrambling to find a home, however temporary, for their large gaming library and the offline, very real gaming community they had created.
“For us it’s been this mad scramble,” Fantastic said. “It was kind of a really shocking development and we didn’t know where to turn.”
“I hoped everything was going to be fine, but I was terrified of where we were going to go in the middle term [between permanent places],” Loter added of receiving the news in the middle of the month.
Then on Wednesday, The Grove came forward as one temporary partner, out of which Elm City Games could operate on a reduced schedule. From just down the street, Valerie Garlick of the Institute Library also offered a venue where Fantastic and Loter could host larger events, like the gaming groups and conferences they’ve brought to New Haven.
As Patel moves, they’ll be trying to remain downtown in their own new space. Which is something, amidst the chaos of moving out, that Fantastic feels pretty good about.
“We’ve crossed over into hopeful and happy again,” he said. “We have a temporary home, and will move to a permanent home next year. This [gamers] is a community we’ve put a lot of effort into, and we don’t want to lose that. We want to keep people together and playing.”
As for Elm City Games’ permanent new home, Fantastic and Loter said only “We really want to stay in the neighborhood, and several leaders in this community want us to stay. We are looking aggressively in the Ninth Square, but we’re not sure what that means yet.”