Wooster Square: Screw U‑Haul

An historic building transformed into a corporate warehouse. A line of noisy trucks speeding through the neighborhood day and night. An opportunity for growth foiled by a chain of broken promises.

Those doomsday scenarios were invoked Monday night as two dozen Wooster Square neighbors gathered at a community meeting at New Light High School Monday night to protest an imminent deal to turn the former C. Cowles & Company factory on Water Street into a U‑Haul storage facility.

U‑Haul’s response: Get used to us. It won’t be so bad.

After the meeting, Pete Sciortino, president of U‑Haul’s Connecticut operation, told the Independent that the neighbors’ input had left him unmoved. He said he hopes to close the deal — which offers the company a prime location, visible from the I‑95/I‑91 interchange — within a week.

“I think once we’re in there, people will know what we’re like,” he said. ​“It won’t be a monstrous center. It will be an in-the-neighborhood-type thing.”

If it does goes through, the U‑Haul deal will mark the end of a two-year-long campaign by the city to have a private owner convert the factory into an apartment complex.

City Economic Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson opened the meeting with a half-hour-long monologue bemoaning the ​“broken promises” that scotched those plans.

“Sometimes bad things happen,” he said. ​“Not because people are bad, but because we disagree.”

Nemerson, who left a family vacation to attend the meeting, has fought hard to prevent U‑Haul from turning the C. Cowles factory into storage. He argued that housing would add more value to the city, in the form of tax revenue and economic growth. And, he said, it would be fitting to transform a historical factory into a new set of homes rather than a corporate storage center. C. Cowles opened in 1838, making lanterns for horse-drawn carriages; it grew into an international manufacturer of tilt-levers for steering wheels, decorative striping that people put on their cars, and electronic controls for boilers.

In 2015, after C. Cowles owner Larry Moon elected to move the historic factory to North Haven, the city helped broker a deal with developer Randy Salvatore to build 200 apartments on the site. Neighbors greeted the plan with enthusiasm. But it fell through last February, after Salvatore and Moon reached an impasse over how to address potential environmental problems. 

Nemerson and Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg held meetings with Moon after Salvatore pulled out — and both walked away from those negotiations with the impression that the C. Cowles owner was enthusiastic about converting the factory into apartments.

But last Wednesday night — to the shock of city officials who thought they had a chance of sealing an agreement to have someone build apartments — the City Plan Commission approved plans for the reuse of the factory as a U‑Haul storage facility. Moon (who could not be reached for comment) moved forward with the storage deal despite an offer by the city to coordinate a development project worth half a million more than the $6 million U‑Haul agreed to pay for the property. (An attorney for Moon told the New Haven Register that while he can’t give details now, the city is offering an inaccurate view of those negotiations.)

“We basically threw ourselves on the ground and begged,” Nemerson said. ​“There had been a social contract between C. Cowles and this neighborhood over 170 years.”

The neighbors greeted the end of Nemerson’s speech with applause.

“You should be booing me,” he said. ​“I tried, and I failed.”

Sciortino stood up from his seat in the corner of the meeting room to defend the U‑Haul project.

“We are not the bad guys. We want to serve the community,” he said. ​“Obviously, we are here to make money. We’re looking to expand. No one wants to have a business on a side street where nobody goes.”

His comments provoked anger from neighbors who insisted that a storage facility would bring noisy trucks rather than optimistic young families to the Wooster Square area. The factory building sits at the far eastern edge of the neighborhood, fronting a commercial/industrial stretch of Water Street.

Rosalind Proto, who lives across from C. Cowles on Chestnut Street, told the crowd that she feels personally invested in the future of the factory, because her mother and other family members once worked there.

“I’m heartbroken,” Proto said. ​“This is our neighborhood. We love it very, very much. We like the people in our neighborhood, and we were hoping we could get even more people.”

Her husband Andy said he hates the idea of outsiders speeding through the neighborhood to drop their belongings in a storage unit.

“We want people we know,” he said, ​“people we can say hello to in the morning.”

Sciortino — who looked each speaker in the eye as he listened to the complaints — insisted that the U‑Haul project will have a positive influence on the neighborhood.

“We are not going to disgrace this building by tearing parts of the old structure down,” he said. ​“You’ll see the building back as it was in its heyday, although it’ll have a flavor of U‑Haul.”

He added that the company will not paint its signature orange and white stripes over the factory’s exterior or allow trucks to drive in and out during the night.

And he was not entirely alone in his support for the storage project.

“I think it’s a great use of the space,” said Cathy Sansone, the president of a condo complex on Wooster Street, to jeers from the other neighbors. ​“I don’t care if you laugh or smirk at me.”

Sansone, who works in real estate, told Nemerson that the housing plan promoted by the city would put too many apartments in too small a space.

“Are you sure you want to live in the city?” another attendee shot back. ​“That’s what cities are about — housing density.”

As tempers calmed and neighbors filtered outside, Nemerson and Sciortino briefly crossed paths at the door.

“So we’re gonna talk,” Nemerson said, with a hopeful smile and an outstretched hand.

“We’ll see,” Sciortino replied, as he hastily walked away.