Elizabeth Hayes hopes a new food store comes in to help jump-start ambitious plans for the Dixwell neighborhood’s main shopping strip.
Hayes (pictured) runs Rite-Way Cleaners in Dixwell Plaza. She has seen her business drop 10 percent since C‑Town supermarket closed April 10, in the plaza’s anchor spot.
Hayes also serves as treasurer of the merchants’ association promoting the urban renewal-era plaza across from the Monterey Homes and the shuttered Dixwell Community “Q” House. The plaza includes smaller shops, as well as the Stetson Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. The association has labored for decades to upgrade the plaza and inject new life into it.
The opening of C‑Town, amid fanfare in February of 2007, was supposed to help do that. It offered convenient supermaket-priced meats, produce and toilet paper to neighbors at the Monterey Homes, which replaced the old Elm Haven projects, as well as homeowners on nearby Frances Hunter Drive and families at Wexler-Grant School.
A bigger Shaw’s supermarket is just four blocks away on Whalley. But especially for people without cars, having a supermarket in Dixwell made a difference.
It wasn’t not enough to pay the bills. “We didn’t make the business there,” local C‑Town manager Alex Poulino said. “We lost money.” C‑Town has stores in Fair Haven and Kimberly Square.
Muriel McKenzie (pictured), who lives in Hamden, would sometimes stop at C‑Town, then at other Dixwell Plaza stores, on her way to or from work at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She liked C‑Town’s selection of kingfish and red snapper.
She planned to stop at C‑Town again Monday morning after picking up hair-care products at Mid‑K Beauty Supply. She hadn’t realized that C‑Town closed its doors three months ago.
“I cook tropical food all the time, and they have the things I need,” she said.
Rite-Way owner Hayes suggested that C‑Town’s emphasis on Spanish products, including hot food, didn’t jibe with the large African-American neighborhood’s demands.
Hayes is looking ahead, though, not back.
“I’m hoping for great things” at Dixwell Plaza, she said. She and the rest of the group have been discussing an expansion. One idea is to move the Stetson Branch to larger quarters at the Q House, assuming a new effort to revive and reopen the center succeeds.
Hayes would like to connect both locations to the Farmington Canal biking/ hiking trail, with signs to the library and plaza.
She’d like to expand her own shop to include a school for tailors and designers. She said she would name the school after three of the black community’s legendary tailors of yore: Clarence Butcher, Ernest Jones (who ran Rite-Way at the plaza) and Wesley Thorpe.
But first, the plaza needs an anchor tenant in the C‑Town space, she said. She and merchants’ group head Gerald Clark said they’re hoping for a food store; Hayes heard a Hamden mosque was also interested. C‑Town’s Poulino, however, said he has no prospective tenants lined up.
Dixwell Avenue is difficult to cross on foot. There are barely any usable crosswalks and I hear speeders barreling down it every night.
Stores don't do as well when you take away half or more of the potential market base. Make it easier to walk to the stores and then they will have customers.
Also, unlike Orange Street (which has pedestrian signs and bike lanes every block), I don't see kids and families biking down the street. The city said a bike lane was going in back in 2003 -- whatever happened to that idea?
Also, some of the properties in the area need code enforcement. Broken glass and litter everywhere. A grocery store won't come back unless a developer is interested, and when they see glass and trash lining certain properties along Dixwell, I doubt that sparks their interest.
I love Hayes idea of connecting the trail to the shops! But in the meantime how about a few "baby steps" to help make sure the stores that we have can succeed?