Kasbah Garden Cafe

105 Howe Street, also known as the location of Kasbah Garden Café, is a Greek Revival style residential home with a commercial extension in the backyard used as the restaurant. From street-view, one can see the façade of the residential home and the storefront of the Moroccan Restaurant through a small passageway. The residential home extends outwards with two levels of Greek Revival style porches, embellished with Doric columns, while the house is covered in a light blue-grey tinted clapboard siding. Kasbah Garden Café is a Moroccan restaurant with open-air seating in the courtyard tucked within the backyard garden and shaded with large trees. Within the restaurant, there are a small collection of tables indoors, but the interior of the restaurant extension is mostly the functioning kitchen. This building is located in the Dwight Historic District, tucked between residential houses and small apartment buildings. Across the street, on the corner of Howe and Edgewood, there are other commercial real estate including the Howe St. Laundromat, a corner-store, Pizza House, and Mamoun’s Falafel Restaurant. 

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105 Howe Street has gone through various transformative stages since its construction in 1890. As depicted in the 1901 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, they record a residential building with a frame that is not fire-resistant with a small brick two-story stable. [7] In the 1974 Sanborn Map, the backyard extension of the restaurant has already been built to accommodate Kasbah Garden Restaurant. [6] The ownership of the residence has not changed since 1977, when it was purchased by Frank S Torok, whom remains the resident and owner of 105 Howe. [12] Since the building is typically recorded in historical documents as a residence, there is little transparency as to whom had lived there prior to the current tenants. Most likely it was used as a family residence or to house students of the nearby universities, but there exists no documentation of previous ownership.

When 105 Howe Street was first construction in 1890, the Dwight Street community was “composed principally of resident artisans and laborers, of which approximately one-third were employed by one of the several carriage firms in the district. The remaining two thirds consisted largely of builders, blacksmiths, painters, and general laborers.” [5] During the 1930’s, when the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation was created by the New Deal to record and document the risk of refinancing and lending money for homes, New Haven was evaluated with these HOLC neighborhood risk maps. In 1937, 105 Howe Street was located within the C-6 District of New Haven, and designated “Third Grade/Declining” in Security and value (out of four grades). This is indicative of the process of red-lining which particularly impacted non-white, affluent neighborhoods in the prevention of attaining loans to reproduce wealth within the community—ultimately this may have resulted in stunted growth and increased delineations of wealth and class within the neighborhoods of New Haven. [10] In the HOLC map analysis of 1937, the C-6 area was predicted to have downward decline in desirability in 10-15 years due “spotty pride of ownership” and “thinness of sales market”. [10] Though this has changed since Yale has expanded its peripheral neighborhood ownership and building occupancy to Dwight street, this points to how gradually the families and “factory workers” [5, 10] were pushed outwards as Yale expanded its geographical influence—in the present day, this neighborhood is largely populated by undergraduates and graduate students at Yale University. 

The Greek Revival style of 105 Howe reflects a trend in the Dwight Street Historic District, when during WWI, “many revival-style apartment buildings and triple decker structures were built…to house this new population [of native and immigrant workers]”. [5] To this day, there are many remaining structures in the Greek Revival and Late Greek Revival style on Howe Street. Around the district, the visual landscape is predominantly 19^thCentury buildings, “brick dwellings that are set back from the street by shallow front yards and paved sidewalks”. [3]

There remains a desire, despite the location being convenient for housing and vacancy being moderate, to enhance the “entrepreneurial direction and urban image” [8] of the neighborhood. The Chapel West Special Services Direct Vision and Strategic Plan perceive “private property owners [in] need [of] help and economic support to improve their image and business” [8] The Chapel West Special Services want to renovate the sidewalks, street amenities, and directional signage, as well as construct street furniture and implement landscaping. 

Located on Howe Street, Kasbah Garden Café is tucked between stand-alone residential houses as well as low-rise apartment buildings mostly populated by off-campus undergraduate or graduate students. The location is in close proximity with Yale campus, Yale Residential Colleges and New Haven Downtown—it lies only three blocks away from the Yale Pierson residential college. Across the street, there are the Off-Broadway Apartments, as well as a corner-store and the Howe Laundromat. Less than a block away, at the intersection of Howe and Edgewood Ave, there are a handful of commercial stores including Pizza House and Mamoun’s Falafel Restaurant. The street is lined with a handful of trees, a sidewalk in semi-worn condition, and lamp-posts with advertisements for the Chapel-West neighborhood. This location is a mixed-use street—a mostly urban residential street with few commercial stores at proximate distances and intersections of streets nearby. Around a block away, there is a large parking structure connected to a larger office building, making Howe Street a convenient location for those visiting New Haven. Kasbah Garden Café is along a pleasant walk-able street that marks the edge of downtown New Haven.