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A Sales Goal Unfulfilled
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Business New Haven
5/3/1999
By: BNH
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Perhaps it should come as little surprise that several of downtown New Haven's stalwart independent retailers have decided to publicly oppose the city's plans to build a $492 million regional mall at Long Wharf.
The proprietors of Barrie Ltd. Booters, Peter Indorf Jewelers, V. Ferrucci Ltd. and Taft Cosmetics made sure that their opposition was noted when they held a press conference April 27 at Barrie Ltd.'s store at York and Elm streets. And because they say they plan to recruit other like-minded individuals to their cause, it is possible, even likely, that this initial group will be joined by other retailers and property-owners as well.
Should a wider group of downtown opponents emerge, this will be a very bad situation indeed for city officials and the chamber of commerce to find themselves in. It will also provide political cover for others who oppose the mall for reasons of their own but until now have kept their heads down. Mostly, however, it poses a real threat to the positive development of downtown and the cooperation needed to create an environment that will attract new customers and new businesses.
We are surprised by this development on two counts. First, overt challenges to the City Hall/chamber power structure - particularly to New Haven's thin-skinned mayor - don't seem very common these days. But what surprises us more is how the city and mall proponents, including what should be sensitive-to-local-opinion co-developers, allowed this situation to develop in the face of their own requests for city and state assistance.
Clearly, in spite of any number of high-profile presentations, the mayor has failed to sell his vision of a larger downtown to the people who have personally invested (in some cases over the course of decades) in downtown. That is a failure that can't be brushed aside. For the larger objective - economic revitalization - to succeed, that failure must be remedied.
We argued more than three years ago that a mall at Long Wharf could provide many positives for New Haven, but that economic regeneration of the city at large would require a very concerted effort in downtown. The effort necessary to keep downtown viable in the face of what will necessarily be a competitive retail threat under the best-case scenario has been utterly inadequate to date.
In the end, though, we are not really so surprised that concerns about the commitment to downtown are so visceral among some merchants. They see a touted conference center in the former UI building at Temple and George going nowhere, the redevelopment of Chapel Square Mall headed for what looks like years of litigation, plans for additional downtown parking moving at a snail's pace.
While some may point to progress in downtown, for the most part they are those who do not have their family fortunes on the line.
We are not optimistic that either the city administration or the chamber will handle this potential downtown insurrection well. But if they don't, New Haven might finally achieve the unity of vision and purpose about downtown that has long eluded it. BNH
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