Barcelona Wine Bar

181 Crown St. is a modern build

1812 – 1841 Joel Walter (as private residence)

1841 - 1894 Amasa Porter (as private residence) [1]

1894 - 1947 Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor (as industrial/retail) [1]

1947 - 1960 Music Corner (as retail until demolishment) [2]

1966 - 1984 Chapel Square Mall (Stevens/ Fusco-Amatruda)

1982 - 1995 Chapel Square Mall (Rouse Company management)

1995 - 1997 Chapel Square Mall (New Haven Chamber of Commerce)

1997 - 2005 Retail (155 Temple St LC and Omni Hotels)

2006 - Present Barcelona Wine Bar and The Wine Thief (co-owned by 155 Temple St LC and Omni Hotels)

Not set on any of the original streets in the nine-square plan, this site would have been a small area within larger plats of land until Temple St. and Crown St. were developed. Crown St. was already present from State street to Church St. in the 1775 Stiles Map of the city, but was only extended to Hubbard St. (now York) and past this site in 1802. Similarly, Temple St. was originally laid out in 1784, but did not appear in any city directory until 1840. [8]

Sometime around 1812, Joel Walter who graduated from Yale in 1800 and was involved in the printing and publishing trade erected a 2-story frame building and lived in it until around 1840 (date is unknown since these streets weren’t included in city directories). By 1841, the house had been purchased by Amasa Porter, a church deacon, who lived in the structure until he died in 1856, whereupon it was inherited by his son, Amasa G. Porter, an attorney, who lived there until his death in 1872. [9]

In 1894 Horace W. Porter sold the home to George H. Tuttle and Cornelius S. Morehouse, two of the three principals at Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor (TM&T), a local printing and publishing firm that was looking for space to expand their operations. TM&T promptly demolished the home and erected a five story Romanesque Revival building that combined two previous lots 123 and 125 Temple Street and featured floor level retail. By 1909 the rapid growth and expanding product lines caused TM&T to take over all of the first floor retail including a third address at 179 Crown Street. In 1911, the company purchased the land from the heirs of Morehouse and Tuttle. [10] The TM&T building stayed under company ownership until January 1946 when it was sold for $80,000 to Realty Inc. a firm owned by Bernard Kepkind Henry Sugarman and George Horwitz and the company relinquished control of the ground level retail. In October of the same year, the firm itself was acquired by the Plug, Strassler, and Weissman Investment Group which liquidated all assets six months later. The entire bottom floor of the building was rented to the Music Corner Record Shop from 1947 until the building was demolished on January 21^st, 1960 to make way for the Chapel Square Mall. [9, 11, 12] 

Background

To understand the current building, we have to go back to 1954, 10 years before it was built, when Richard C. Lee was first elected mayor having run on a campaign that promised to revive the stagnating city through massive redevelopment. By then, new haven was suffering from a diminishing tax base, increased crime, and gross ethnic and racial divisions. The city had gone from 80% of the local population living in the dense urban area in the 1920s to just 50% in the 1960s and had seen a 41% increase in crime from 1950-1960 due to the consolidation of industry and disappearance of urban based manufacturing as well as the rapid flight to suburbia as highways and private automobiles gained prominence. [1] By clearing slums, developing highway connectors and incentivizing commercial development in the central business district, Lee sought to eradicate urban blight.

Initial Project

Having already begun work on the Oak street connector to bring suburban traffic into New Haven, Lee turned to his next project, the Church St. redevelopment and renewal plan which became known as the Chapel Square Mall. [2] The project was initially meant to be a simple redevelopment of the vacant Gamble Desmond building alongside the mall, but Lee hoped to make a splash and turned to prominent developer and Broadway producer Roger L. Stevens for help in 1955. Stevens, who had become famous for buying and selling the Empire State in just 24 hours and securing a $2M profit, was uninspired by the small project and wrote to Lee: “You know, the problem with our deal is it doesn’t go far enough. We should expand our thinking to include the full width of the Green and include four more blocks.” [3]

Tempted by the potential of an even larger project, Lee agreed to clear the city blocks through eminent domain and condemnation, after which Stevens would buy the site for $4,303,821 and pump $25M of development into the construction of a hotel, office tower, department store and retail complex which would be designed by New York City architect Lathrop Douglass. A parking structure known as the Temple Street Garage would be designed by Paul Rudolph and payed for by the New Haven Parking Authority. The deal was signed by both parties in 1958 and by 1959 the city had begun forcing businesses out of their buildings. By 1960 the majority of the site had been cleared (see site history and images – the Tuttle Morehouse and Taylor building which originally occupied this site was one of the last to go). Malley’s a local department store agreed to move into a dedicated building in the future complex, and Sheraton began negotiating for rights to build the 350-room Park Plaza hotel.

Due to the non-traditional plan and the forced clearing of 4 blocks in the center of downtown, development moved slowly and Stevens began bleeding money. Turning to Yale for help in 1962, Stevens received a $4.5M loan and an introduction to Macy’s executives who agreed to move into the second department store building, which opened in 1964. By then, Stevens had grown tired of the politics involved and handed off development of the hotel to the Gilbane Building Company and office/retail to the Fusco-Amatruda Construction Company, which completed the project in 1967. [2]

Failure

Despite initial success as a shopping center, the Chapel Square Mall was developed in a tumultuous time for the city’s retail environment. Between 1960 and 1973 3.3 M square feet of retail opened in seven shopping centers around New Haven and by 1982 Malley’s shut down after 129 years in business [1]. In 1984 as the city was about to acquire control of the project the Rouse Company, a Maryland based mall developer expressed interest, purchased the retail structure and pumped $14M into its redevelopment, including a new picnic-style food court and new, high-end tenants. [4] Between 1987 and 1997, New Haven retail saw another 29% decline and key tenants such as Macy’s and Cornan’s furniture moved out (in 1993 and 1994, respectively), forcing the Rouse Company to relinquish control of the retail property to the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce in May of 1995. [2, 5]

A year earlier, the Cordish Company, a Baltimore based developer bought the Park Plaza hotel, which had gone bankrupt – utilizing a $10M state grant and pumping in an additional $10M themselves to redevelop the property as the Omni hotel. [6] When Rouse left the retail center, Cordish received option rights to entire compound, but those rights were illegally reneged by the Chamber of Commerce, leading to a large lawsuit. In 2002, the Chamber of Commerce sold the retail property to Williams Jackson Ewing Inc. and Lubert-Adler Partners for $2.6M and $900k in debts owed. The two firms converted the mall into a 75-unit residence court and leased out ground floor retail to various shops such as including Ann Taylor Loft, Cold Stone Creamery, Quizno's and Rite Aid. [7] The two department stores were knocked down in 2010 for the $140M development of the Gateway Community College Campus which opened in 2012. 181 Crown is technically part of the larger Chapel Square Mall, but is still owned by the Cordish Company since it was once attached to the hotel. In recent year, this retail outpost, consisting of just two storefronts has been rented out to Barteca Restaurant Group, who operate the Barcelona Wine Bar, and The Wine Thief, which both moved in in 2007.

Hosting both Barcelona Wine Bar, a popular tapas style restaurant and The Wine Thief, a boutique liquor and wine shop, 181 Crown St. is strongly associated with the hustle and bustle of night-time entertainment, despite the menacing quality of Paul Rudolph’s brutalist style Temple Street Parking Lot after sunset. New developments in 2017 like Brother Jimmy’s BBQ, a new eatery and bar with heavy traffic on Thursday evenings caddy corner to the building, Olives and Oil, an Italian restaurant and frequent Greek-life formal venue directly as well as the massive Vanity Restaurant and Venue, a nightclub frequented by up and coming DJs across Temple Street, are quickly establishing this intersection as the center of New Haven nightlife. Other nearby attractions are Stella Blues and Cask Republic, both bars as well as Mecha Noodle, a 2016 ramen restaurant. During the day, the restaurants see some traffic, but most public movement takes place a block north along Chapel St. 

181 Crown is part of the larger Chapel Square Mall, a block-encompassing 2-story tall concrete and brick façade in modern minimalist style. While the Chapel and Church sides of the building interact with and invite in the public realm by recessing the ground floors to develop covered walkways, the Temple and Crown sides are mostly flat against the sidewalk, with only minimal depth changes at reinforced concrete piers and glazing, which composes the entire ground floor. The second floor is separated by a horizontal concrete beam has no glazing and includes a continuation of the structural piers separated by dark Ironspot roman bricks (similar to those used by Frank Lloyd Wright). The building is topped by a horizontal protruding concrete cornice with a series of lights for wall illumination. The two tenants have fairly idiosyncratic entrances, Barcelona opting for a Corten steel sideway and heavy vertically slatted wood door and The Wine Thief employing a comical backlit sign surrounded by a metal cornice with a series of solid gridded arches and a lilac door. 

[1] Rae, Douglas W. City: Urbanism and Its End. Yale University Press, 2008.

[2] Lewis, Dain. The Developers Game: The Private Sector and the Church Street Project, 1955-1964. New Haven Museum, 2007

[3] Talbot, Allan R. The mayors game: Richard Lee of New Haven and the politics of change. New York: Praeger, 1970.

[4] "Chapel Square Mall." Mall Hall of Fame. March 2009. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://mall-hall-of-fame.blogspot.com/2009/03/chapel-square-mall-chapel-and-temple.html.

[5] Connecticut Department Of Economic And Community Development, Finding Of No Significant Impact: The Galleria At Long Wharf, Appendix J, Mar. 9, 2000

[6] Charles, Eleanor. "Yale Works to Break Down the Town-Gown Barrier." The New York Times. September 24, 1994. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/25/realestate/in-the-region-connecticut-yale-works-to-break-down-the-town-gown-barrier.html.

[7] Wiznia, Marc. "Chapel Square Mall finally set for overhaul." Yale Daily News. January 24, 2002. Accessed February 26, 2018. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2002/03/26/chapel-square-mall-finally-set-for-overhaul/.

[8] Townshend, Doris B . The Streets of New Haven: The origin of their names. New Haven, New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1998 .

[9] Dana, Arnold Guyot. Dana Digital Archives at the New Haven Museum. Accessed February 2018

[10] Tuttle Morehouse & Taylor, Company Archives at the New Haven Museum. Accessed February 2018

[11] Price and Lee’s New Haven City Directory [1947-1960]

[12] “Last to Go,” New Haven Journal Courier, Jan. 21, 1960. Accessed through Dana Archives at New Haven Museum.