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Broadway Bound
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Business New Haven
3/22/1999
By: BNH
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Though they don't seem to care much about informing you or us about it, the people who make the decisions about Yale University's vast real-estate holdings made an important one a few years back that bears mightily on the future of commerce in downtown New Haven.
The Broadway retail district is the Elm City's “other” downtown and, unlike the retail districts within the Nine Squares, it has been a consistently performing hub of commerce and activity. With thousands of Yale students, faculty and staff living and working a stone's throw away, Broadway has never lacked - and likely never will lack - a captive clientele with money to spend.
Indeed, to much of the transient Yale community, Broadway - more than the Green, or the harbor - is the face of New Haven. Over the normal four-year undergraduate tenure, its crowded shops and eateries become like old friends you can rely on for emergency sundries or a late-night nosh.
The solons who run the university and manage its properties see this through a different lens. Rents from Broadway businesses are a welcome revenue generator, of course, and University Properties' objective is less keeping individual storefronts filled (especially when demand exceeds supply, as is presently the case), than it is maximizing that revenue. That means welcoming tenants with the deepest pockets.
But the dollars and cents have become a secondary consideration to marketing of a different sort. To better sell Yale and New Haven as a place for students to live, the university has embarked on “Broadway 2000” aiming to reshape the face of Broadway retail.
In a nutshell, that means less funk and junk in favor of more ritz and glitz. That means comfort-inducing chain stores such as Au Bon Pain and Origins, with their clean, by-the-book layouts (and deep pockets) will eventually elbow out small, locally owned independents.
The ultimate expression of this trend came two years ago when University Properties declined to renew the hoary Yale Co-Op's lease in favor of superstore Barnes & Noble.
One of Yale's worst-kept secrets over the last quarter-century has been the negative impact of New Haven's image on the university's efforts to recruit the best students, most distinguished faculty, most able administrators. Surely the sight of boarded-up, graffiti-scarred Chapel Street storefronts has played a role in sending potential Yalies to more welcoming environs like Princeton or Palo Alto.
The Yale administration wants to change that, and is moving aggressively to do so. That means Broadway is hell-bent for upscale. And that could spell trouble for the Yorksides, the Educated Burghers, the York Squares of the world.
Que sera, sera. But two concerns linger. As local business people ourselves, we are ever-sensitive to sea changes that result in a net outflow of dollars from greater New Haven. And a greater preponderance of chain stores in one of the city's few remaining successful retail districts surely sends dollars out of the community, as well as placing local business in peril.
But even more so: As consumers, we find ourselves more powerfully drawn to the homespun, only-in-New Haven offerings of a Doodle burger, or a slice of Broadway Pizza, or an Italian film not available elsewhere between New York and Boston, than we ever will to sterile chain-store fare.
Maybe it's just us, but we like New Haven just fine. If we wanted Palo Alto, we'd move there.
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