J. Press New Haven at College & Crown

College & Crown[i] is a six-story, $50 million mixed-use building by Svigals + Partners that epitomizes the future of urban living in New Haven: affordably built complexes with luxury touches[ii]. Its 160 apartment units include studios (leased at $1620/month) and penthouse lofts ($5000/month) with one or two bedrooms, framed by nine-feet ceilings and hardwood floors. An on-site fitness center, two rooftop courtyards, a clubhouse, a recreation room, and concierge services complete this high living experience, exquisite yet conspicuously dissonant with New Haven’s divisive and rapidly growing income inequality[iii].

College & Crown also features 20000 square feet of retail space and 138 underground parking spaces, notably fewer than what were required in the 1980s and 1990s when cars ruled the streets of Elm City[iv]. Venerable men’s clothier J. Press, founded in 1902 on Yale University’s campus and known for its old school New England style, was the first retailer to move into College & Crown in August 2015[v]. Robert Landino, CEO of Centerplan Companies, the developer of College & Crown, has called J. Press the retail anchor of the complex[vi]. This title rings of irony, for 206 College Street is explicitly the temporary home of J. Press, after a winter storm in February 2013 ravaged its historic French Second Empire 262 York Street storefront[vii]. New Haven demolished the structurally unsound building in January 2014, forcing J. Press to relocate to 260 College Street, and then to its present address[viii]. A conversation with a J. Press worker revealed the clothier very much intends to move back to its original site, as Yale University works with J. Press and City Hall to rebuild 262 York Street.[ix]

This particular building has no past tenants, since Svigals + Partners built it for Centerplan. College & Crown retailers include Jack's Bar and Steakhouse, J. Press, Webster Bank, and Bonchon Chicken.

In August 2014, Robert S. Greenberg, a local amateur historian, overlaid historic maps of New Haven atop Google Earth to reveal that the corner of College and Crown Streets was mere yards away from a long-vanished creek and the spot where emissaries of Reverend John Davenport, founder of the American colony of New Haven, came ashore in 1637. Landino declined to allow Greenberg to examine the soil of Centerplan’s development site to corroborate his suspicions and retrieve potential artefacts[xxix].

The history of the College and Crown Streets intersection is one of significant transformation. As early as records go, development in the area began as a residential space for Yale scholars and Christian religious leaders. In 1815-1816, a house was built on-site for Professor Josiah W. Gibbs, Professor of Sacred Literature at the Yale Divinity School. Professor Thomas A. Thacher and his family moved into the house in 1867, and lived there until the house was demolished in 1915. Across the street in 1884, Reverend Doctor Croswell moved into his new house[xxx]. According to atlases, the intersection remained fairly underdeveloped come 1901, with the exception of small museums on Crown Street[xxxi].

Several early mixed-use developments in the intersection anticipated the 2015 arrival of Centerplan’s College & Crown. The 1890 two-storied family home of Ira Atwater began to house bistros and shoe repair shoes on its ground level by 1956. A New Haven newspaper article in April 1915 recounted the ownership change of the Dr. Hubbard house on the northeast corner of College and Crown Streets; — the purchaser had taken it over with a view of erecting a business block on the site in the near future. The 1903 Hutchinson Apartments were truly a mini College & Crown in their own right: flyers advertised Hutchinson as a modern and up-to-date student apartment house in New Haven and as the center of sophomore life[xxxii]. In 1933, the city removed Hutchinson to make room for a parking space, which a 1946 map indicates was owned by E.F. Faust[xxxiii].

1961 saw the arrival of 196-212 College, once again at the intersection of College and Crown Streets. The modern office and retail building exemplified the late twentieth-century New Haven redevelopment era. Diverse companies occupied and rotated through the so-called Crown Street Buildings from 1961 to 2006: AH Brown Leather, Fenmore Hats, Felmont Maternity Shop, Albram’s Clothing Inc., Samuel’s Shoes, Vierra Home Improvement, and Scarpellino's Restaurant, among others[xxxiv].

In 2006, New Haven approved Landino of Centerplan’s proposal to build Residences and Shops at College Square, a 19-story residential-high rise on a lot bound by 188-196 College Street, Crown Street, and George Street. Residences and Shops at College Square would feature 276 luxury condominiums ($400000 to $1000000/unit) covering 15 floors, above two floors of ground-floor retail, and two floors of parking[xxxv]. 

Landlords of 196-212 College readily sold their land to Centerplan and forced small businesses out of the lot. However, the financial crisis of 2007-2008 threw an unexpected wrench into Landino’s plans and Centerplan waited to modify their plans for the site[xxxvi]. In the meantime, New Haven locals found innovative ways to use the empty Crown Street Buildings before the structure was demolished and converted into surface parking. For example, in October 2010, ArtSpace, a contemporary art gallery and non-profit organization, transformed the emptied SERA Nail Salon at 206 College Street into the Social Experiments Relational Acts salon[xxxvii]. Landino had permitted City Hall and ArtSpace access to the building pending his revised long-term plans[xxxviii].

Centerplan Companies eventually decided that a low-rise rental building would be a better fit for graduate students and professionals walking to school or work[xxxix]. Landino hired Svigals + Partners to design College & Crown, asking architects to focus on creating a medium-size success, rather than a large-scale risk[xl]. College & Crown’s first anticipated completion date was Fall 2014, but ultimately opened its doors on October 29, 2015[xli]. College & Crown remains a dynamic site. Not only do retailers continue to cycle in and out of its retail spaces, from the Fall 2017 opening of Bonchon Chicken to the imminent evacuation of J. Press, but a conversation with a worker in the apartment lobby also revealed that average tenant turnover is a mere thirty days.[xlii] 

Enshrined in New Haven’s latest Comprehensive Plan is the idea that downtown is for mixed use: residential living, business, and medical services[xxiii]. Former City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg once defended the city’s rewrite of its zoning rules to facilitate the entry of complexes such as College & Crown by noting the direction in which twenty-first century “new urbanism” is heading: highly dense and geared towards street and pedestrian life. According to Gilvarg, we are no longer in the 1960s, during which planners designated downtown as a commerce-only space[xxiv].

It is important to observe that mixed use does not imply democratic use or equal access. Centerplan Companies has proudly advertised the fact that College & Crown has the highest rents in the market[xxv]. When J. Press moved in, Landino publicly expressed that the clothier would bring value to his tenants[xxvi]. Note that J. Press apparel can cost hundreds of dollars — Landino must have had a particular demographic of tenants in mind.

Unsurprisingly, College & Crown has a social history fraught with backlash and displacement. In September 2015, Yale Daily News interviewed an anonymous resident of Church Street South who bemoaned the offense of the Centerplan complex: while New Haven supports projects for the sake of Yale affiliates, it throws New Haven locals to the side[xxvii]. After all, College & Crown could only exist and be so profitable today at the expense of locals’ financial loss. In November 2006, Landino’s development proposal forced all small business owners in its path to quickly relocate their storefronts. We get the sense that zoning officials at City Hall should have known better than to support Landino and consequently feed Connecticut’s widening income gap between the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent[xxviii].

With its elm leaf ornaments and clean exterior that has yet to betray the wear and tear of time, College & Crown is meant to be attractive to future tenants: New Haven’s wealthy and image-conscious young professionals and scholars. However, the look and feel of such new buildings inevitably raise larger issues, from planning to pride of place to zoning to exclusivity.

College & Crown sits at the juncture of what have historically been two difficult New Haven streets. Developer John Schiavone, who is credited with transforming downtown New Haven in the late 1990s into a bustling neighbourhood and theatre district, had envisioned College Street as a central entertainment district — a revitalization project that would spill over onto Crown Street and increase its accessibility and foot traffic. In 2004, the scene on Crown Street was not what Schiavone and Elm City planners had hoped. While College Street now boasted upscale restaurants, theatres, hotels, and cigar lounges, Crown Street had become known for providing a less highbrow form of entertainment[xviii].

Presently, despite extensive development in the past decade, the corner of College and Crown Streets is still widely reported to be a complex location. At College & Crown’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp called this complexity “so emblematic of the city”[xix]. For instance, memories of violence haunt and mar the urban setting. In September 2010, after gunshots erupted on the same intersection, the city announced Operation Nightlife, a police initiative to crack down on nightlife culture in the downtown clubs and bars[xx].  

The Crown Street of 2018 overflows with culture, as it contains many of Connecticut’s best restaurants and clubs, while College Street connects the New Haven Green to the Shubert Theatre to Yale’s historic campus. Another apartment development targeted toward Yale graduate students, Metro Properties, stands a mere 50 feet away from College & Crown[xxi]. Yet, a certain tension remains in the intersection. Physical markers of stress show up in small graffiti marks on College & Crown, but never on the façade, always on the side. Perhaps subconsciously, these graffiti artists feel like they have been pushed to the margins of the neighbourhood.

Pedestrians feel tension in another way: the street between College & Crown and Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, which face each other, is noticeably and uncomfortably narrow. Alas, corporate interests and power narratives have influenced the urban setting of College & Crown. Robert Landino, a former state representative himself, had hired zoning attorney Anthony Avallone to represent Centerplan Companies. At a Board of Zoning Appeals meeting for College & Crown, Avallone successfully pushed for zoning variances allowing smaller side and rear yards, more building coverage, higher walls, less open space, smaller parking spaces, and a greater floor-to-area ratio than otherwise allowed in New Haven, in order to accommodate the scale of development that his client desired[xxii]. Thus, College & Crown intrudes into the street.