The Exchange Building

This building established the corner of Chapel and Church street as the center of the business district in downtown New Haven during the 19th century. It is currently home to commercial shops on the first floor and various offices on the upper 3 floors. It is a Greek Revival as well as Colonial Revival / Federal style commercial building with clean and simple lines outlining the exterior, which is mostly brick and some stone/cement. Overall, the building is in very good physical condition and does not appear to be suffering from aging or deterioration of any kind. A series of shops have circulated through the first floor of the building, as it remains mostly for commercial means. The upper 3 floors have been mainly reserved for offices and business use. 

Various retail and offices (1832-2013), The Downes News Co. (1850-1891), Paul Denz (2013-2017), Sovereign Bank (?-2017), Annie E. Casey Foundation (foster care agency) (1976-2013), CVS Pharmacy (2017-present), New England Investment Partners (2017-present).

There is not much known about the site before the Exchange Building occupied it aside from a few very old maps accessed through the Gathering a building project. One of the oldest maps of the original 9 squares from 1748 of New Haven depicts the corner of Chapel and Church street as the home of a man named Israel Smith. In another map from 1824, it appears that this corner was still residential. Finally, the Exchange building was built in 1832 as an effort to create a commercial district in the downtown of the city. The building has remained in this spot ever since. 

The Exchange Building has a long commercial History, a lot of which is not precisely documented. Since it was a commercial building, there were many switches in ownership over its large history. From the early time of this building, photographs show the commercial state of the first level of the building in 1933. It can be speculated from these photographs attached below what businesses occupied the first floor of the building. It is clear that there was once a Metro Mart on the corner of the first floor, a shop called Merle’s Record Rack on the Church street side as well as fashion store next door. On the Church street side of the building Ned’s Stand, a Newspaper, magazine and book shop, and Unique Boutique both occupied storefronts. Overall, this shows the pattern that the first floor of this building was always used for commercial means. It is also speculated from the photographs that the upper levels of the building remained offices as they were meant to be from the building’s construction.

A well known company that occupied a storefront in the Exchange Building from 1850-1891 was The Downes News Co. This shop was known as New Haven’s first news dealer and it sold New York papers to the public. More recently, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a foster care agency, occupied the top 3 floors of the building from 1976-2013. After shutting down their operations in 2013, developer Paul Denz purchased the building immediately and leased the office space. During this transition the first floor remained as a Sovereign Bank. In 2017, however, the building went on the market again. Denz ended up selling the building to New England Investment Partners for three times the amount he bought it for. New England investment partners then leased the top three floors to the current tenant, Square 9 Softworks. 2017 also marked the transition from Sovereign Bank to CVS Pharmacy on the first floor.

These constant switches in ownership show us a few different things about the Exchange Building. Firstly, it shows us that this is a highly desired spot in the city. Its location in downtown brings in a lot of business which is why it is the heart of the commercial district. Secondly, It reveals a pattern in land use that this building portrays. Through this history, it is very clear that the first floor was always used commercially and the upper floors were offices and non-retail businesses. This same pattern is true for many tall buildings that we see today. 

The Exchange building is in the midst of New Haven’s financial and commercial district. It was initially the first building meant solely for commercial use in New Haven. Its position on the corner of Chapel and Church street puts it in the center of downtown, a hustling and bustling area of the city often congested with traffic on both the street and sidewalk. Directly across the street is the New Haven Green, a highly functioning civic space in the city. Its location across from the Green would have welcomed many people into the commercial first floor of the building, which as said before was once more open with many different storefronts.

Though the exchange building itself has not changed much since it was built, aside from the smaller renovations, the surrounding area has changed a lot, as can be seen through the Sanborn Maps. Initially, in 1886, this block of Church street contained a church and a hotel along with the shops that lined the first floor of the Exchange Building. By 1901, the hotel remained, but the church had been converted to a public library. By 1973, both the hotel and church had been demolished to accommodate the Second National Bank Building and United States Post Office and Court House. Overall, this area of the city has always been highly interactive with the public, and the Exchange Building was the heart of the early commercial activity in this part of town. In present day, It is surrounded by other commercial buildings as well in the forms of retail and food shops. Directly across the street from the Exchange building today is a clothing store and a Starbucks Coffee among many other forms of retail in the area including Blue Nile Jewelry, Taste of Brazil Restaurant, and Dollar Tree convenience store. 

This building employs Greek Revival as well as Colonial Revival and Federal styles. The Greek Revival is portrayed through the abstracted columns on the first level of the building. These are very simple columns that were implemented as ornamentation and do not bear any structural significance to the building. The space in between these columns is filled with larger single paned windows. The shape of the building is simple and rectangular with a flat corniced roof. The top 3 floors are made of red brick, whereas the first floor is white stone/cement. The double-hung windows are given slight accentuation by having white stone outlining their sills and headers. One good indicator of the building’s Colonial Revival/ Federal style is its entryway on the Church street side which can be seen in the figures below. The entrance to the building was initially positioned underneath 3 windows that are decorated with colonial revival ornamentation. This entrance has been relocated to the end of the building on the Chapel street side.

The first level of this building has gone through a lot of change that we know of. Many different shops have cycled through residency on the first level. In one of the archival photos, it can be seen that the first floor may have once been a much more open space in a colonnade- esque format. This would make sense for its positioning across from the Green as the building could easily welcome people into its storefronts, thus interacting with the street more actively. Now this colonnade area has been shut off completely by large wooden/glass panels that enclose the large CVS Pharmacy within. One of the most interesting stylistic details is the cupola that juts out of the center of the roof. It is a large, white, cylindrical cupola with a domed copper top. The original cupola was removed to put a billboard at the top of the building, but this cupola was restored back to its original place in 1990. Renovations to the interior were done in 2003. 

"123 Church St." Vision Government Solutions. Accessed February 26, 2018. http:// gis.vgsi.com/newhavenct/Parcel.aspx?Pid=13660.

Bailey, Melissa. ""Exchange Place" Sells For $2.7M." New Haven Independent. October 18, 2013. Accessed February 26, 2018. http:// www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/ denz_buys_church_st._building_for_2.7m/.

"Exchange Building, 121-127 Church Street, 855-871 Chapel Street, New Haven, New Haven County, CT." The Library of Congress. Accessed February 26, 2018. https:// www.loc.gov/item/ct0434/.

"Historic Buildings of Connecticut." Historic Buildings of Connecticut RSS. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://historicbuildingsct.com/?p=784. O'Leary, Mary. "New Haven developer Paul Denz turns handsome profit selling Exchange Building." New Haven Register. July 23, 2017. Accessed February 26, 2018. https://www.nhregister.com/connecticut/article/New-Haven-developer-Paul-Denz- turns-handsome-11315169.php.

Shapiro, Gideon Fink. "Gathering a Building." Gatheringabuilding.yale.edu. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://gatheringabuilding.yale.edu/#/routes/historical-geography.

"Walk New Haven." Walk New Haven. Accessed February 26, 2018. http:// walknewhaven.org/tours/sites/downtown/downtown_site08.html.