ACME Demolition Uncovers 9th Sq. History

Hiding behind the walls and beneath the floorboards and amidst the rubble of a mid-demolition former vintage furniture store is pile after pile of Ninth Square history.

Fortunately, New Haven’s ​“Indiana Jones” is on the scene — combing through the wreckage and preserving whichever artifacts from the city’s commercial and industrial past he can find.

The location of that interior demolition-turned-impromptu archaeological dig is 29 – 33 Crown St. 

The vacant four-story brick building between Orange Street and State Street most recently housed ACME Furniture, a longtime family-owned Ninth Square merchant that officially closed its doors in 2016.

Over the past few weeks, an EMERGE construction crew has been busy tearing down the building’s wood-paneled walls and underlying framing to make way for New York City-based developer Jeff Spiritos’ planned redevelopment of the historic property into a new six-story, 18-unit ​“mass timber” apartment complex.

While the hard-hatted contractors hammer and drill and pry their way towards the building’s greener future, local artist and historian Rob Greenberg — whose family founded and ran ACME for over a century — has been by their side, picking through the detritus and identifying fragments worth preserving. 

Those include an early-20th century Yale baseball schedule card from a printing company that used to operate out of 31 Crown St., painted signatures on the building’s second-floor walls by men who worked on the building in the 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers that indicate that a Jewish tailor may have once operated at that property, and — the mechanical crown jewels of the building’s past — two elevators, a freight elevator from 1916 and a crank elevator several decades older, both of which still work.

“You’re getting to see the layers of time that existed here, and little fragments of the history and of the lives that worked in this building are being exposed,” Greenberg said with characteristic enthusiasm for New Haven relics during a recent Thursday afternoon visit to the demolition site with this reporter. 

“You’ve got a building that was built in 1877 and that had multiple sides to it. Many businesses over the years have been in this structure. And these guys are exposing lots of that history.”

Greenberg runs a local museum of Elm City artifacts, memorabilia, and ephemera called ​“Lost in New Haven,” which is currently located in a Hamilton Street warehouse. 

With the help of EMERGE and Spiritos, he plans on holding onto and displaying as many pieces of New Haven history as he can find that turn up during this transformation of his family’s former commercial digs into new housing.

Even after the apartment development is complete, Spiritos promised, the historic brick building that has long stood at 29 – 33 Crown St. will remain in place. Just with two extra stories built of cross-laminated timber walls and floors stacked on top, and with the interior converted into 18 apartments and ground-floor retail space.

“It’s called: preserve, restore and grow a mass-timber building out of it,” Spiritos said when asked on Thursday why he decided to rehab and build on top of the existing structure rather than just knock it all down and construct anew. 

“The idea being that it’s not healthy environmentally to demolish something that has remaining useful life. We’re able to capture the quality that’s in this old building and enhance it with the addition and the remodeling, rather than creating the environmental destruction and having to rebuild again from scratch.”

Blacksmith, Baseball, Pressed Tin

Greenberg’s tour Thursday began in a stripped-bare and debris-strewn room at the back of the building’s first floor. 

In the 1970s, this was his dad Alan’s office at ACME.

“My father used to sit right here,” Greenberg said, pointing to a circle of light stubbornly visible amidst the dirt and darkness.

A century ago, Greenberg said, this space was occupied by a blacksmith’s shop. He said he uncovered material from the blacksmith shop way back in 1978.

When Spiritos and EMERGE tear up the concrete at the base of this former room, Greenberg said, he anticipates discovering material buried in the dirt that may date back as far as the 18th and 19th centuries.

“My father put this concrete down and he encapsulated the dirt that’s under it,” he said. Who knows what may still be lying underneath.

Greenberg took a break to call out quickly to the manager of the demolition crew, Santos Colon, who was working to break loose a bit of defunct electrical equipment from a nearby alcove.

“Santos, we’re gonna save that, right?” Greenberg shouted across the way.

That’s right, Colon replied.

Colon told this reporter that, on Thursday afternoon, his demolition crew was ​“gutting the inside of the” building, tearing off the wood paneling and pulling out the framing behind it ​“to get to the tin and expose the original bricks” that make up the building’s walls.

What has been his favorite discovery so far while working on this project?

“I’d have to say the baseball card from Yale,” he said.

That card, Greenberg said, dates back to 1907. ​“It was a Yale schedule card,” he said, ​“from a business we didn’t know existed at 31 Crown St.”

The front of that schedule card states that it was printed by The Baldwin Press. ​“We take pleasure in announcing the removal of our business to 31 Crown Street, where we have larger quarters and better facilities for doing your work,” the card reads. ​“We have modern machinery and type and will endeavor to please you in every way. May we not have a share of your patronage?”

The inside of the card, meanwhile, states that Yale’s 1907 baseball schedule began on Wednesday, April 10 with a game against Fordham. It ended on Saturday, June 1 with a game against Harvard.

Greenberg described the EMERGE crew as ​“efficient, fast, clean. I’ve never seen a crew like this.” Every time they tear open a wall or knock down a ceiling, another piece of history seems to fall through.

That includes some Yiddish-language newspapers that turned up in the floors of the building’s third floor, he said, Greenberg thinks that part of the building was once used by a Jewish tailor or corset shop.

Heading to the room on the eastern side of the ground floor, Greenberg pointed to one of the last remaining stretches of wood-paneled walls, soon to be peeled back to reveal pressed tin and — behind that — brick.

Greenberg said his grandfather bought the building in 1940 from The C.S. Mersick & Co., which sold — according to a tag found by Greenberg at the demolition site — ​“iron, steel, metals, hardware, factory, mill, electrical, automobile, plumbing and roofing supplies.”

“This is what my grandfather saw” when he bought the building, Greenberg said, pointing to the white pressed tin walls decorated with ornate flourishes. ​“And this is what my dad did,” he continued, pointing to the vertical wood panels.

“He created the ​‘Mad Man’ look,” Greenberg said about his dad’s furniture store. ​“But this building dates back.” He said the pressed tin likely dates back ​“to the turn of the century, easily.”

Going Up On A 106-Year-Old Elevator

Greenberg and Spiritos then took this reporter in one of two extant — and functioning — elevators in the building.

The larger one is a ​“freight” elevator that dates back to 1916, and was built by the New Haven-based Eastern Machinery Co.

“This is the oldest elevator in New Haven,” Greenberg said as we slowly rose to the building’s third story. ​“It was created by Frederick Farnsworth, who was once the mayor of New Haven” and who started the Eastern Machinery Co.

After taking a flight of stairs to the fourth floor, Greenberg showed off the tumble of gears and machinery that allow that freight elevator to still work.

“This, to me, is one of the coolest things in New Haven,” he said. ​“It runs like the day it was built.”

Nearby in an adjacent fourth-floor room, Greenberg showed off a so-called ​“crank elevator.”

“Here’s the hatch,” he said. ​“Basically, a line went up and you pulled material from the ground floor all the way up. It was either steam driven or pulled.”

“As a little kid, I used to turn it,” he said, holding onto one of the levers of the crank elevator. ​“It was like Frankenstein here.”

Greenberg and Spiritos said that both of the elevators will be ​“craned out of the roof” and ultimately deposited at Greenberg’s Lost in New Haven museum before the redevelopment of the former ACME building is complete.

"Graffiti" From The 1920s

One of the last stops on the tour before this reporter had to jet off to another assignment was the building’s second floor, where Greenberg pointed out century-old ​“graffiti” from construction workers of New Haven past.

“All over the walls on the second floor are writings from the different men who worked on the building,” Greenberg said. 

Written in black paint and surprisingly legible for being nearly 100 years old, the various signatures appeared to be from the early 1920s and 1930s.

“Before they put the slabs up,” Greenberg said, his voice just loud enough to be heard over the sound of pounding hammers one floor below, ​“they signed their names.”

Pipes & Bikes & the "Original Nine Squares"

For a bit of help uncovering even more of 29 – 33 Crown St.‘s history, the Independent reached out to New Haven Museum Director of Photo Archives and local micro-history author Jason Bischoff-Wurstle to see what his institution’s trove of local maps and photos revealed.

Bischoff-Wurstle said that the Crown Street parcel was ​“part of the original Nine Squares” of New Haven. 

A 1641 map of the city shows that George Lamberton, the captain of the famous ghost ship, owned land that was either adjacent to the ACME property — or perhaps even covered part of the back half of the current parcel.

A 1724 map, meanwhile, shows that an ​“uninhabited barn” stood on the site, which in turn was quite close to the old harbor front area. The whole neighborhood at that time was ​“all oriented toward the water front,” he said, which ran all the way up to where State Street is now. ​“This was the edge of the waterfront area.”

A map from 1888 shows that the building at the ACME site was owned by E.W. Bishop, Bischoff-Wurstle said. He said that building has a ​“distinctly different floor plan” than the building that currently stands. That Bishop-owned building could possibly have served as the ​“core of this building” that stands there today.

Around 1911, he said, the Mersick company likely moved into the building after vacating its former building closer to Orange and Crown Street because of a large-scale fire at the nearby gas company.

Mersick was a wholesaler of hardware, metals, pipefittings, and other supplies, he said. They started out as a carriage manufacturer, and ultimately transitioned into making automobile parts. Whatever blacksmith operation worked out of the ground floor of the ACME building was likely during the Mersick years.

“They sold gasoline engines, pumps, and pumping machinery, along with smithing and millings and pipefittings,” he said.

Photos from the 1920s and 1930s show that the future ACME building housed a variety of businesses, including a bicycle shop, Wilcox photo engraving, Booth and Law prints, a wallpaper company, and a paper company.

“By this time, the second floor was being marketed as a rooming house,” he said.

Which makes sense, he continued. ​“The neighborhood at that point was shifting over to boarding hotels and more wholesale home goods items.” That’s likely why ACME ultimately moved its furniture store to the property after Greenberg’s family bought the building.

Click here, here and here for more on the history of the former ACME building.