Nightjar Hamden Dispensary

Drive about three miles north of Yale on Dixwell Avenue and you pass a long, low brick building set back behind a lawn and a curving fieldstone path (Image 2). It looks more like an office than a factory, and that was the point. Built in 1937–38 for the Himmel Brothers Company, a New Haven maker of metal storefronts, the plant gave an industrial building the polished face of a modern shop.[1]¹

The property covers about 3.8 acres and has lived three lives: a factory, a long vacancy, and now a redevelopment that pairs a cannabis business with housing.[2]² Today you enter Nightjar on the south side, and Yale shuttles park in the long lot behind the building.

There is an irony here. Himmel belonged to the show-window tradition that remade American shopping streets,[3] and a company that spent half a century making the fronts of other people’s buildings left behind a building whose own front is the part people remember.³