In early 2015, Provost Ben Polak informed the university community via email of yet another reconfiguration of Yale’s New Haven: the construction of a new housing complex for graduate students on Elm Street, which would move some residents of the Hall of Graduate Studies to the last undeveloped swath of land in the Broadway District. Here, among franchises of upscale brands, sat a final relic of the area’s less polished past—an asphalt parking lot, bordered on Elm Street by a rusted metal fence. This August, jackhammers and hardhats welcomed students old and new back to the Broadway District. The rusted metal fence was gone, and construction had commenced on the development at 272-310 Elm Street.
Come October, excavation work will begin; come early-2017, the mixed-use development will rise above ground. Just after the end of the next academic school year, graduate students will call the former parking lot home, and the Shops at Yale will stretch uninterrupted from one end of the strip of Elm Street between York and Park Streets to the other. Two floors of retail space will sit below four levels of two-bedroom apartments—41, in total.
In many ways, this construction marks the apotheosis of University Properties’ gentrification of Yale’s periphery. It also marks a different kind of phenomenon: the continued blurring of the boundary between town and gown, as students relocate away from the heart of their campus and deeper into New Haven. And so when university officials dug shovels into dirt for a staged groundbreaking on August 24th, they affirmed Yale’s unchallenged transformation of New Haven into a neo-Gothic and red-brick fantasyland for its students and visitors alike.
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Yale, for one, sees the construction of this new housing complex as a realization of its vision for the Broadway District. “Where students live is an integral part of their graduate experience at Yale,” said Karen Peart, Deputy Press Secretary in the Yale Office of Public Affairs & Communication. “The goal is for them to foster deeper connections with each other, with Yale, and with their surrounding neighborhood and community. The new building will be in the heart of New Haven’s downtown, close to the Broadway shopping district. This gives students an opportunity to live in a building that is central in terms of both the university and New Haven.”
There is more to this “surrounding neighborhood and community” than meets the eye. This is a landscape of Apple Stores, Urban Outfitters and American Apparels. There is an outpost of Kiko Milano, whose website identifies the company as providing “face and body treatments of the highest quality, created to satisfy women of all ages.” Maison Mathis, with two locations in Dubai, sits near the corner of Elm and Park Streets. This is to say that the Broadway District serves as a gilded fringe to the blight of nearby neighborhoods, like Dwight and Dixwell.
But all is not well at the Shops at Yale: EmporiumDNA—an upscale clothing store with several locations across the United States—closed its shop at 1 Broadway last June after floundering since opening in 2014. Just across the street at GANT, retail associates mill about their under-frequented storefront. Manager Garrett Henson said: “We don’t see many students. They come and check things out, but not many of them buy clothes.”
From a safe distance, George Koutroumanis, the owner and manager of Yorkside Pizza, has watched this partial implosion of the Broadway District, which sits a block away from his own business. Koutroumanis noted: “In a nutshell, everyone’s trying their hardest to keep going.”
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It seems, then, that the Broadway District has not succeeded in all the ways Yale intended. To this end, one of the area’s few recent successes has been Junzi Kitchen, whose location at 21 Broadway is the only property in the Broadway District that University Properties does not own. In fact, Lucas Sin, DC ‘15, Junzi Kitchen’s owner, attributed the restaurant’s popularity to his practice of inverting the neighborhood-building efforts of University Properties.
Sin said that nearby big-box stores have done little to recognize their siting here in New Haven. It is for this reason that he has emphasized “hyper-locality” in building a culture for Junzi Kitchen: “Yale students have a next-to-zero relationship with the real residents of New Haven,” he said. “I like hiring locals who are younger. They’re all from New Haven and their work experience is working in a high school cafeteria or an old people’s home. They may be considered to have limited experience and prospects, but that’s not how I run kitchens. To me, the food that comes out is largely a product of the people who make it.”
In acknowledging the recent cultural sway of “hyper-locality,” Sin is onto something. Arethusa Farm Dairy, which opened its location at 1020 Chapel Street last spring and sources products from a farm in nearby Litchfield, Connecticut, often boasts lines out the door. At Four Flours Baking Company just up Chapel Street, a husband-wife duo from Woodbridge, Connecticut sell popular, baked-from-scratch goods. In other words, the big-box stores of Broadway are out, and local establishments are slowly creeping in.
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And so when the new graduate housing complex reaches completion in 2018, University Properties will face a dilemma: whether to pursue its Potemkin village of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel or whether to abandon this pursuit altogether and to subscribe to a new paradigm of development—of “hyper-locality” instead.
Sarah Eidelson, JE ’12, Alder to New Haven’s Ward One, where the development sits, hopes that University Properties adopts a strategy more in-line with Sin’s Junzi Kitchen: “It’s important that Yale is extremely thoughtful about what the residents of the area want to see and puts in businesses that are affordable and cater to the experiences of the people who live both in downtown and in other parts of the city.”
Some students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—who will one day inhabit the development—reiterate Eidelson’s sentiments. These students advocated for practicality over the sorts of showcase storefronts that currently line the Broadway District. Miranda Sachs, GRD ’17, for one, said: “I think it would be really helpful to have a pharmacy or drugstore, as it would be helpful to have one a bit more central to campus.”
Eidelson and Sachs see the construction of the new housing complex as a chance for University Properties to revisit the identity it has long impressed upon the intersection of Broadway and Elm Streets. But not everyone is so optimistic: “University Properties is notorious for a long, arduous, bureaucratic process of vetting what businesses go into their spaces, in part because they want to make money from these businesses and they want to make sure that the businesses don’t screw up the culture of the space,” Sin said.
Perhaps, though, it’s this very culture that needs to change.