Paul Bass Photo
The former Newt’s Cafe.
Vuoso: Pizza’s on its way.
The head of Whalley Avenue’s improvement association has kept a key block blighted for years because, he said, he’s not a slumlord.
John Vuoso made that argument after coming under fire for the longstanding condition of two trashed, abandoned properties in the heart of the Whalley commercial drag: the former Chuck’s Lunchette at 339 Whalley and the former Newt’s Cafe next door. Vuoso also serves as president of the Whalley Avenue Special Services District (WASSD), which seeks to beautify Whalley.
Vuoso has promised to fix up the properties since 2007, encountering, he said, one unforeseen problem after another. He said he now has a tenant — Triple AAA Pizza — fixing up Chuck’s in order to move in soon from its current location a block down Whalley.
Vuoso and WASSD’s vice-president, Pat Minore, came under criticism most recently this week during a heated City Hall meeting over plans to move the neighborhood police substation to a Minore-owned building across from Chuck’s. The substation’s current landlord, who’s losing the lease, criticized WASSD for supporting the project when Vuoso and Minore have failed to improve a total of four blighted properties on one block. “WASSD has been co-opted by two major slumlords,” the landlord, Daniel Greer, remarked at the meeting. (See video.) “They’re not business people. They’re piranhas. And they’re … bottom-feeding on the neighborhood.”
“I’m a big boy. I can take the shots,” Vuoso said in an interview Thursday. “I don’t run away from anybody. I want the district to look beautiful.
“Who do I rent to that I’m a slumlord? I’m not here for the almighty dollar.”
Vuoso, who’s 54 and lives in Norwalk, has been working in New Haven since 1980. He runs the Lee Myles transmission shop on Whalley in addition to owning and managing properties throughout the neighborhood.
He spoke of how he came to encounter problems with a group of properties between Sherman and Winthrop avenues — and how he resisted deals to recoup losses that, he said, would have damaged the neighborhood.
“I am nothing other than trying to do the right thing,” Vuoso claimed. “It’s costing my family money.”
“Nightmare After Nightmare”
The former Chuck’s.
Vuoso invests in neighborhood properties with his brothers Albert and Mario. Their holdings include four contiguous lots starting at Sherman. A five-family house stood at the first lot; Vuoso said it was a dilapidated “crack house” when he bought it. He razed the house in the 1990s and made it available to the city for a community garden. The next lot is an automotive repair shop which has remained in business.
Next is the former Chuck’s. Chuck and Marge Alpert ran the storied Jewish deli-style and breakfast-lunch joint from 1954 through the mid-1990s. It was a popular neighborhood hangout and a spot where politicians made deals over plates of eggs, homefries and pastrami sandwiches.
The Vuosos bought the property in 1988. It had two upstairs floors at the time. After the Alperts retired, Vuoso found a new tenant, the owner of the former downtown Copper Kitchen, whose family members tried to make a go of the joint. They renamed it Chuck’s Luncheonette (from Chuck’s Lunchette). The business went through three operators.
In 2007, a fire ravaged the building. According to Vuoso, his tenants, who had a lease for the whole building, operated a rooming house upstairs, where an occupant caused the blaze.
Vuoso said he tried to sell the property to a bank; the deal fell through.
Meanwhile, he evicted Newt’s Cafe from the building next door. It had become a “problem bar” in the eyes of the city as well as in Vuoso’s eyes. That building, too, is trashed.
He sought to rebuild the old Chuck’s. Then came “nightmare after nightmare after nightmare.”
He claimed a now-dead member of the tenant group had “bullshit everybody” by presenting bogus insurance documents, which meant the business wasn’t covered.
He demolished the upstairs floors. He wanted to finish gut-rehabbing the first floor, but a court case was in the way, he said. “Some prostitute” who had visited the building shortly before the fire sued his tenant after suffering injuries in a slip and fall, he said. Vuoso, as the building’s owner, was not a named party but could theoretically be liable for damages. The judge in the case told him not to proceed with repairs pending completion of the case.
The case was resolved in October 2011. Vuoso resumed work on the property, while seeking a new tenant. He put in a new foundation, extended the basement. After he finished that work, he got into a fight with the Water Pollution Control Authority, which requested he build a water-separation tank; Vuoso said it would cost too much to rip up the floor again. That dispute took years to resolve, he said; finally he won permission not to build the tank.
In this April 2012 interview, Vuoso said he had run into delays, including a four-week-late door delivery, but that he planned to finish renovations within eight months and then reopen the restaurant himself.
He hired a contractor to put new siding down on the outside as well as a new roof. The contractor did “a hit-and-run” and disappeared before finishing all the work, Vuoso claimed.
He shelved plans to reopen the diner himself, he claimed Thursday, partly because the cops waited too long to move into the planned new substation across the street.
To date, he has spent $274,000 on the property, Vuoso said. Yet he acknowledges it remains an eyesore after eight years of vacancy.
City government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), has a program to inspect and license landlords’ buildings. But it applies to residential rental properties, not commercial properties like Vuoso’s.
LCI Deputy Director Frank D’Amore said the agency nevertheless met with Vuoso numerous times about the blight. “He always said he’s been working on it. It’s a slow process. He always had a reason” for delays.
“I asked him: ‘Can you at least paint the boards in front? It’s a main road.’ He said yes,” but never followed through.
No Convenience Stores, Thank You
Vuoso said he received many inquiries from business owners looking to occupy the former Chuck’s or Newt’s, Vuoso said. They all wanted to put in convenience or liquor stores or other undesirable businesses. He said he chose to lose the money on potential rent rather than drag down the neighborhood further.
In two cases he did proceed to the contracting-writing stage with two potential occupants — two groups looking not to rent, but to buy all four of the properties. One, affiliated with Dunkin’ Donuts, wanted to build a factory on the property. That fell through when the group decided to locate in a different town instead, Vuoso said. The other fell through, Vuoso said, when he asked the potential buyers their plans for the properties; they mentioned opening a pawn shop.
He said Whalley needs more service businesses. A shoe-repair shop, say, or a hardware store. Not a low-rent barber shop or convenience store.
“We’re a service district,” Vuoso said. “This is not a destination to eat at Tre Scalini or Pepe’s Pizza. You come to get your car fixed. You go to Edge of the Woods to get your tofu. You come to get your graphics done.”
WASSD Executive Director Sheila Masterson said Vuoso is “not exaggerating” about the numerous offers to rent his buildings to businesses that fail to fit in with the district’s revitalization goals. “He could have rented it a hundred times over to a convenience store or a liquor store or a storefront church,” she said.
She said that “since the moment he took over” as WASSD’s board chair, Vuoso has brought “a lot of energy and passion” to the quest to improve the district. Click here to read a story about an effort Vuoso helped launch in 2010 (pictured above) to beautify the corner of Winthrop and Whalley with the help of city dollars. Vuoso put up the $800 for flowers to fill newly constructed beds.
“Too Long”
The back of Vuoso’s properties.
But the continuing blight at Vuoso’s properties has frustrated members of the Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) management team.
Bob Caplan, who served three terms as WEB president said he sympathizes with each of the individual explanations Vuoso has offered over the years.
“But there have been too many reasons for too long,” Caplan said. “The chair of WASSD should be setting an example of how things should be done and working faster to get things accomplished.”
Vuoso said Thursday he’s turned the corner on the former Chuck’s. Crews have been renovating the interior on behalf of a new long-term tenant, Osman Boluk, who owns Triple AAA Pizza, a restaurant currently situated in smaller quarters a block west at 383 Whalley. Vuoso said he gave Boluk free rent for the beginning of the lease so he could afford to fix up the place before moving in.
Boluk said he entered the lease because he needs a bigger space. He said he also likes that the building has its own parking lot. Besides, he said, he doesn’t like his current landlord.
Boluk has hired an architect and contractor. The project has encountered delays. Boluk said he has had some problems with the architect.
On March 11, a project manager, William Beausoleil, emailed a housing inspector to express his “concerns about the way this is ‘proceeding,’” concerns he stated that he has forwarded to the project’s “banker and attorney.” (Reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Beausoleil said the problems have been rectified; then he hung up before responding to follow-up questions. He stated it a subsequent email that he was “unlikely” to want to answer questions from a reporter.)
Records on file at the city’s building department show that Boluk may have purchased an outdated used hood and fan system for the kitchen. Before that, according to city Building Official Jim Turcio, an inspector found problems with the staircases. But those problems have been straightened out, and the project is moving forward, Turcio said. Boluk needs to buy a new hood, but overall, Turcio said, the project is moving forward, and change might finally come to the block.
AAA is right next to NEWT'S. If they move over, there will be 2 vacant buildings in a row. How is this a victory for the district? ITs really more of a shuffle-up than a sign of progress.
Vuoso is nice to try to be a leader for Whalley businesses but I wonder if there are better options out there.
[Note: AAA is a block past Newt's, next to Edge of the Woods. LA Deli is next to Newt's.]