Thomas Breen photo
The Palladium building at 135 Orange St.
New Haven Museum image
What the Palladium building looked like in 1860.
The upper levels of the city’s first circulating library and first public high school are now office space and 10 luxury apartments.
On Tuesday afternoon, dozens of New Haveners took a series of guided tours through the recently renovated Palladium Building at 135 Orange St., which is owned by Juan Salas-Romer and his real estate company, NHR Group.
The fourth and fifth floors of the five-story, mid-19th century building serve as the corporate headquarters for NHR Group, which manages over 1,200 apartment units throughout New Haven and Fairfield County and will be adding 67 more units in the Elm City with the new “Heights on the River” project in Fair Haven Heights.
A second-floor studio apartment at the renovated, historic Palladium building.
The second and third floors of the historic building are now home to seven studios, two one-bedrooms, and one two-bedroom apartments, all with loft spaces. Lauren Lenox, a property manager with NHR, said that the monthly rental prices for the apartments range from $1,595 for the smallest studio to $3,200 for the two-bedroom.
She said that the first tenants will start moving into the finished apartments on the second floor on Nov. 1, and that the third-floor apartments, which are still under construction, should be finished and available for rent by the end of November.
The ground floor of the building houses three retail outlets: Whole G Café, Tikkaway, and Devil’s Gear Bikeshop.
The opening reception for the renovated Palladium building at Orange and Chapel Street on Tuesday.
“We’re a small building in terms of our boutique apartment-style community,” Lenox said while leading a tour of one of the second-floor studios.
She said that, from the apartments’ exposed brick wall sections to their high ceilings and tall windows and hardwood floors, the new units retain many of the architectural elements that distinguished the building dating back to its original construction in the mid-19th century.
Local historian Colin Caplan.
In an empty studio apartment on the second floor, local historian and architect Colin Caplan introduced visitors to the history of the building, pointing up to a banner timeline with historic photos of the building itself and famous Americans associated with it.
According to Caplan and a ground-floor historical panel written and researched by the New Haven Museum’s Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, the building was constructed in 1855 and opened on Oct. 13, 1856 as the home of the Young Men’s Institute, a private membership library that predated the city’s public library by three decades and exists to this day in a neighboring building on Chapel Street.
Bischoff-Wurstle writes that the building was likely designed by New Haven architect Henry Austin, who also designed the City Hall building on Church Street, and features a brownish-red sandstone façade cut by the stone-cutter G.A. Shubert.
Caplan pointed out that the Young Men’s Institute, which was founded in 1826 by young tradesmen looking to read, share, and talk about books among peers, invited to New Haven such eminent American scholars and politicians as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Ward Beecher.
Some famous Americans associated with the Institute Library, which was the original occupant of the Palladium Building: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher
“On the top floor,” Caplan said, “in 1859 was the first public high school in New Haven,” which would later move to another building on Chapel Street before taking on the name Hillhouse High School.
After eight years under the ownership of the Home Insurance Company, Caplan said, the building became home in 1875 to the New Haven Palladium newspaper, an anti-slavery-tilting daily that was edited by Institute Library co-founder James Babcock and which occupied the building until 1910.
Babcock, an early supporter of the Republican Party, was instrumental in bringing presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln to New Haven for a campaign stop in 1860. He said that Babcock hosted Lincoln at his home on Olive Street.
In the New Haven Museum’s panel, Bischoff-Wurstle goes on to note that the building also served as an annex to the popular Shartenberg’s department store (located where the 360 State St. apartment complex is now) in the early 20th century, before suffering from a substantial fire in 1921 that damaged the upper three stories.
The Palladium was acquired by the New Haven Redevelopment Agency in the 1950s, the panel reads, and was slated for demolition to make way for new retail stores and parking garages planned for up and down Chapel Street in the 1970s.
But it dodged that fate thanks to preservationist outcry, and eventually was acquired in 1977 by Nicolas Merletti. Bischoff-Wurstle writes that a successful renovation of the historic building began in 1981, just before the creation of Pitkin Plaza in 1983.