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Playing with Blocks
Macy's, Malley's and mall blocks the keystone to downtown redevelopment
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Business New Haven
3/19/2001
By: Deborah Ketai
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It's your first trip to New Haven.
You take the Route 34 connector to Church Street, passing Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the vacant block that once was the Malley's department store. The size of the buildings and the honking automobiles tell you you're in an urban downtown district - or an urban ghost town.
Or…You're returning to New Haven after an absence of ten years. You drive into downtown and have the same reaction: Where is everybody?
We who have lived around here for a while know the story. Macy's closed down in 1993. The lot where Malley's stood was cleared in 1998. Spaces in the Chapel Square Mall are going begging.
The shrinking of the neighborhood's retail base has stripped much of the appeal - and the shoppers - from downtown New Haven's main point of entry.
Common Ground
Not that there's been any shortage of ideas to resurrect the area. In fact, discussion got pretty heated during the era of the Great Mall Debate. But now it's over, people who were on opposite sides of the argument seem to be finding common ground.
Three blocks of common ground, to be precise, known to locals as “the Malley's block, Macy's and Chapel Square Mall,” that form a huge, necrotic mass in the heart of downtown.
What remains of the Chapel Square Mall occupies two floors at 900 Chapel, a structure that includes an office tower and abuts the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale.
Therein lies the rub.
The fate of 900 Chapel depends partly on the eventual outcome of ongoing litigation between Baltimore developer David Cordish, who co-owns the Omni, and Chapel Square New Haven Inc., a for-profit subsidiary of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
The suit has been going on for so long that the New Haven parties closest to the matter cannot even agree on what caused the Baltimore developer to take legal action in the first place. Did Cordish believe he had bought the Chapel Square Mall along with the Omni? That he had the right of first refusal to develop 900 Chapel? That the city should not have further mortgaged the property to move the now-defunct Yale Co-op into the building?
Whatever the case, the man who has perhaps been most closely identified with the building since the mid-1990s disagrees with those who say the court case is hindering development.
Matthew Nemerson, for 13 years until last March president of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, still runs Chapel Square New Haven, the entity created six years ago to fill the void left when the Rouse Co. decided it no longer wanted to manage the mall.
“No one has seriously come to us with plans to develop the site,” Nemerson says. “If someone came up with a solid plan - and the money to implement it - it would make sense to settle with Cordish.
“Anything to develop that site is going to cost tens of millions of dollars,” he continues. “Cordish is disputing the $800,000 or whatever it is we spent to move the Co-op in. Clearly, $800,000 is not going to stop a $20 million deal.”
Nemerson never expected that the city would still be worrying about 900 Chapel in 2001, much less that he would remain personally involved. What he sardonically refers to as “our Cordish caper” began when the chamber and the city negotiated a deal with Cordish to redevelop the hotel. “Since the office tower is part of [the parcel], it got wrapped in,” he recalls. At the time, everyone thought Cordish was going to exercise his option by spring of 1996.
“We thought of ourselves as legal caretakers,” says Nemerson. “It never dawned on us that we'd be managing this thing semi-permanently.”
Hope springs eternal, though: “There's still a very, very good chance that the suit will be thrown out of court, and then we'll get on with our business.”
Urban Planning
The city of New Haven's recent call for development proposals didn't include 900 Chapel. Henry Fernandez, the city's economic development administrator, acknowledges, however, that his office has a strong interest in the fate of the Chapel Square Mall and its surmounting office tower.
“We don't actually own [the building], but we're planning to work with the owner,” Fernandez says.
The request for proposals was stimulated by “a variety of developer interest” in the properties that formerly housed Macy's and Malley's. Now, says Fernandez, the city wants “to see what the market will bear.”
Fernandez has a wish list of sorts. He'd like to see the sites used for “something that will build jobs and reduce the tax burden for everyone” and that would complement rather than compete with existing downtown venues. In his eyes, for instance, a big dance club would be unnecessary and inappropriate.
Some people have labeled the talks with Ikea, ABC Carpet, and CuraGen dead, but Fernandez implies that they are continuing. He declines comment, however, “Because that's not the way we treat developers.”
Still, it doesn't appear that Fernandez - or, by extension, the city of New Haven - has any concrete plans for developing the Malley's-Macy's-mall blocks (hereafter referred to as “The 3M Zone”).
By contrast, many local shopkeepers can tell you exactly what they'd like to see done.
Connecting the Dots
At the intersection of York and Broadway, Barrie Ltd. Booters is several blocks from the Chapel Square Mall. Co-owner John Isaacs sees his store's location as emblematic of the challenge that faces New Haven merchants: Groups of retail establishments currently occupy separate little islands, scattered over a wide area.
In fact, Isaacs, who heads up external communications for the Broadway Merchants' Association, sees the zone as “a dividing area between the currently successful portion of Chapel Street, from, say, where Blockbuster is, between that area and Wooster Square.”
Instead, he and many others envision “a large walking downtown district” with Broadway at one end and Wooster Square at the other.
For that to happen, Isaacs believes, you need “a level of activity all the time, a feeling of safety all the time.” In addition to the mix of day and night activities, you need different kinds of people, of housing, and of retail - what he calls “good sidewalk activity.”
“Layer the development,” Isaacs pleads. “You can't have a retail area that's safe after 9 p.m. if there's no housing.” At 900 Chapel, for instance, he'd like to “turn the mall inside out,” creating streetfront retail on the street level. “The second level could be a mix of activity. Anything would be good as long as no one thing takes over the space. It would be a mistake to put all retail on the first two levels and all office space on the upper levels, with no apartments.”
Up on the tenth floor of the office tower, Chamber president Anthony Rescigno agrees in principle on mixed use of the three-block chunk of downtown real estate.
Unlike Isaacs, however, he sees no problem with a large part of the 3M Zone going office instead of retail. “Bringing in 1,000 or 1,500 workers would generate a tremendous amount of economic development in terms of where they go for shopping, where they go for eating, where they go for entertainment,” says Rescigno.
On the other hand, he notes, “If we have quality retail down here, coupled with some nice looking buildings and a nice looking entrance to the city, it would bring in people from out of town.”
“The most critical things that we can do for [the city's] image is if we fixed these three blocks,” he says.
The notion that the revival of downtown New Haven depends heavily on cleaning it up led in 1997 to the creation of the Town Green Special Services District. The privately funded group seeks to promote an inviting, clean and safe environment for everyone who works, lives, shops or otherwise visits downtown. The same logic forms part of the rationale for rebuilding the Church Street South bridge.
Chip Croft explains, “Our key goal right now is to make downtown a 'Retail Destination,' with capital letters.” Croft and his wife own Seychelles, a Chapel Street boutique. When he says “our” goal, however, he means not the pair of them, but the United Merchants' Association.
Around 120 merchants belong to the umbrella organization, of which Croft is president. Their stores extend from State Street to Dwight Street and from Frontage Road to Trumbull Street, a territory that includes Isaacs' Broadway district.
That area overlaps the zone covered by the city's Façade Project. Fernandez, whose office administers the program, says the program “goes from Crown to Chapel and State to College and includes Ninth Square.” He claims that about 40 buildings are currently getting facelifts by virtue of the program.
Fixing It with the Mix
Croft underscores that cleanup alone won't transform the district.
“In order to do that,” he says, “we need a critical mass of retail. We have a fragmented downtown that we need to develop to keep it from being too fragmented. But it has to be done correctly with a good mix of independents and chains, mixed in with entertainment.”
When Macy's left, he adds, small retailers felt the difference.
While agreeing that “You need some big-box retail,” Nemerson can't see recruiting the giant economy-sized stores for the business district. “You're not going to have the room to do an Ikea or something huge like that, and you're probably not going to get a service outfit like Staples.”
Croft, on the other hand, appreciates the current willingness of many big-store chains to scale down in order to fit into downtown locations. He points to Barnes & Noble and Urban Outfitters as prime examples.
The desire for mixed use of the 3M Zone is not confined to downtown merchants. Rescigno recites a list of what the biotech firms are clamoring for: “additional parking, retail, night life as a recruitment and retention mechanism.”
Fernandez wouldn't mind seeing “an additional biotech site, not unlike the sites at Science Park or 300 George.”
“Our needs in terms of demand,” he says, “are Class A office space, particularly with available parking. There's obviously a growing need for biotech space, particularly near the medical school, which these blocks are. And there's a genuine need to expand and grow the arts district.” Finally, he adds, there's a tremendous demand for near-downtown residential space, though he considers such development more likely for the Church Street South neighborhood than for the 3M Zone.
Park It Right Here
Pretty much everyone agrees that whatever goes into the 3M Zone has to include parking.
Lots of parking.
The renovation of the Macy's garage will help. Still, Croft laments, “We're pretty well tapped out for on-street parking.”
Mentioning the Macy's garage seems to animate him, and not just because of the parking. “As I understand it, there's two 20,000-square-foot retail spaces under the Macy's garage,” he reports, noting that those spaces could be further subdivided.
Of course, the development options for the 3M Zone go beyond retail, housing, office space, biotech and parking.
A conference center would certainly draw large numbers of out-of-towners to downtown New Haven.
Then there's drama - the kind created by playwrights and actors, not political factions.
Fernandez maintains that the city still hopes to lure Long Wharf Theatre to the Malley's site. “Some of their reluctance is a reluctance of time,” he says, since the playhouse's current lease has five or six years to run.
Filling the Vacuum
No one questions that something has to be done with the 3M Zone. “At my count,” says Croft, “there are more than 60 empty retail spaces downtown right now. That includes the mall.”
Everyone, including Croft, seems to agree that the three blocks require a cohesive development plan rather than a piecemeal approach.
But Nemerson warns, “You've got to move quickly, because the more people realize that downtown is going to be a focus of development, property values are going to go up,” sending the eventual cost of the transformation even higher.
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