New Haven Independent

Neighbors invited City Hall and the cops to see for themselves the situation on Tour Avenue, Valley Street Ext., and the northernmost block of West Rock Avenue, a three-block enclave off Whalley Avenue where artists, Buddhists and other professionally oriented people have fixed up old homes and factory buildings and revived the area. They say they’ve run smack into the noise, gunshots, illegal street parking, and sidewalk drunkenness associated with a blue-collar bar known as the Owl’s Nest at 3 Tour Ave. They want the city to create a residential parking zone, crack down on misbehavior of bar patrons, and deliver new no-parking signs, speed bumps and sidewalks.

Heather Hurst (pictured), a Yale doctoral student, and artist Matt Garrett led the tour. They both live on West Rock Avenue. Garrett spoke of having his car totalled by a drunk patron leaving the Owl’s Nest. Hurst spoke of patrons dealing and using drugs, having sex, and yelling and fighting all hours of the night.

“Anybody want a drug bag?” asked Cass Vertefeuille, picking up a glassine pouch with residue still in it. Vertefeuille just opened a new business, Green Leaf Therapies, around the corner on Whalley.

Virginia Heath told of how, two weeks ago, her daughter was putting her 18-month-old child in a car seat when a drunk Owl’s Nester allegedly rammed into her parked vehicle. “He could have killed her and her baby,” Heath said. Others told of having their parked cars totalled, too, by the bar’s patrons — including a woman who lives on the other side of Whalley Avenue.

Hurst and Garrett stopped the group of 25 or so walkers at the bar’s parking lot, which sits down the block at the corner of Tour and Valley Street Extension. They said because there are no fences or obstacles in the lot, “cars fly around the corner” and through the lot. And because there’s no sidewalk, there’s no safe place for people to walk there. “How many near misses do we have to have?” Hurst asked.

“It would be a very expensive project to put sidewalks in,” responded Jeff Pescosolido of the public works department. He suggested that planters and medians could do the trick in the lot.

Listening with interest was Tim Mulcahy, who’s building 293 apartments off Blake Street right across the narrow West River. The apartments are going up fast; there were visible from the lot.

The tour wasn’t noticed inside the Owl’s Nest itself, where Tavonn Jenkins, 27, was hanging out with about half a dozen other patrons. No one claimed to have known about the protests against the bar. “It’s cool to me,” Jenkins said of the Owl’s Nest. He likes to stop by after work at Yale-New Haven Hospital for the happy hour chicken wings.

After the walk about 30 people crammed into Kehler Liddell Gallery on Whalley to press officials for action. City Hall’s Rob Smuts and top district cop Bernie Somers said they were listening and would work with neighbors to improve the situation. The gallery was filled with wonderful artwork by two of the angry neighbors on the tour, sculptor Gar Waterman…

… and photographer Garrett. It underscored the point about the vibrancy of the Village’s revival, which neighbors claim the bar threatens.

The biggest surprise came when, amid the passionate complaints about the bar, its properietor, Jose Cunha, walked in, signed the register, and stood toward the back. Alderman Tom Lehtonen, who ran the meeting, had invited Cunha. Cunha listened silently for a while.

Then, when one neighbor said she was “willing to stand outside your bar and screw up your business, in a legal way,” Cunha responded. He insisted the bar doesn’t have problems. Neighbors responded that what his patrons do outside is his responsibility, too. Cunha said that the neighbors failed to contact him in the past to work together. Some said they felt intimidated; others said they had tried to work with him years back but been ignored or treated with hostility. Click on the play arrow at the top of this article and on the arrow below to watch snippets of the exchanges.