Antillean Manor

Built by the New Haven Redevelopment Agency in 1972 as an affordable housing cooperative, the Antillean Manor was a 4-story structure of cinder blocks and poured concrete. It was demolished in 2023, and has been replaced by a new apartment building.

Provenance + Forebears

On the 1911 New Haven Atlas, the property now occupied by 206-266 Day Street — more or less a single, immense structure — was split up into twelve nearly equal residential plots that spanned the block between Chapel Street and Edgewood Avenue.

Day Street, oriented North/South and running parallel to Dwight and Kensington Streets, could very well have been made an archetypal neighborhood of single-family homes. Good portions of the more southern parts of the avenue appear on surveyor’s maps as early as 1886 and denote a history of a dense but partitioned residential community that likely pursued a suburban ideal with relative proximity to the New Haven Green and Downtown.

The character of the block and the larger Dwight Street neighborhood remained much the same through the first half of the 1900s and during the relative prosperity of the Second World War. The post-war boom resonated in New Haven as it did in many Northeastern cities.

Background of Urban Renewal

By the middle of the century, however, industrial weakening and a mass movement to the growing suburbs of the city had left New Haven — especially the downtown areas — in noticeable decline. By 1954, then-mayor Richard C. Lee had begun some of the earliest major urban renewal projects in the US, and the New Haven Redevelopment Agency — a government-sponsored entity — would be responsible for hundreds of ground-up revitalization projects across the city in the following two decades.

Germination + Construction.

Following several major additions to the urban fabric of New Haven (including the completion of nearby Interstate 91), priorities for the city’s renewal shifted from transportation to habitation, and plans for several units of affordable downtown housing were prepared.

Certain areas became the focus of more intense programming, among them the Dwight Street neighborhood, which included several blocks of Day Street. By 1965, plans were in place for low- to median-income housing that would ultimately replace the twelve single-family homes that ran the length of the block between Chapel and Edgewood. On June 28th, 1966, the last of the twelve units was sold to the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, which paid each of the homeowners $15,000-16,000 (equivalent to $95,000-102,000 in 2007) for the residences and the land on which they stood. Soon thereafter, the houses were vacated and taken down.

Under Section 236 of the National Housing Act, construction on the Antillean Manor at 206-266 Day Street began in July, 1970 and came to characterize the Dwight Renewal Project. The building cost the NHRA $759,200 ($4 million in 2007), and the first families were moving into the new housing by winter of 1972/73.

The four-story building erected on Day Street was an exercise in low rent and capacity. The edifice comprised 31 residences: 4 one bedroom, 11 two-bedroom, 9 three-bedroom and 7 five-bedroom apartments.

In 1972, maximum rental fees had been capped at $199 for the five-bedroom suites and decreased proportionately to $175, $152 and, on the low end, $129 for one-bedroom accommodations. With the high and low of those numbers comparable to less than $950 + $600 today, respectively, the initial ideal of housing low- to median income families seems almost reasonable. At the time, it was likely a welcome addition to available housing options. Across the street from a school and adjacent to a park, it was likely attractive for the same reasons the neighborhood had been as far back as 1886.

The allure of the idyllic single-family home, however, had been replaced by a challenging piece of architecture that likely had very few familiar traits in the eyes of potential tenants. Designed by Milford, CT architect David Travers (to whom no other area buildings are easily attributed), the cinderblock and poured concrete construction is an anomaly, objectively owing something to the functionality of bunker and military architecture and to the flexible modularity of systems like that of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh projects.

Navigating the then-awkward balance between public and private spheres, the co-op was built with its most noticeable and notable feature — a system of modular fence/railing/ wall pieces — creating literal barriers to the realms outside itself. Each staircase was edged with them, each balcony used them as its railing, even the several first-floor apartments with the luxury of a miniature front lawn had these cast monoliths in place of the proverbial picket fence.

The wall system visually unifies the building (actually a composition of five units separated by three covered carports that provide access to the rear parking lot) by extending itself down the entire length of the block-long facade. It’s horizontality (due both to architectural styling and sheer length) is most striking when seen from Chapel street; viewed obliquely in this way, the building hardly has an end and tends to act as its own vanishing point.

Painted white, with the exception of the beige-brown partition system, the effect of the massive structure — 31 units, four stories, 33,128 sq. ft. of living area — is softened somewhat by the elimination of its naturally gray construction color. Nevertheless, it remains an imposing structure.

Monumental and peculiar though it may be, the construction is decidedly inhabited: the Antillean Manor at 206-266 Day Street exists and functions today much as it did thirty-seven years ago, housing approximately thirty low- to median-income individuals, couples and families. Whether or not it will continue to operate in this manner is, of course, uncertain.

While the flat-roofed building is solid and sound, the school across the street has since ceased operations. In this writer's view, the tone of the neighborhood is a depressed one, suggesting that the Dwight Renewal and Redevelopment Area is again in need of, if not renewal and/or redevelopment, then, at the very least, some sort of resuscitation.