Ely Center Races Clock To Buy Ely House

The Ely Center of Contemporary Art is busy not just putting art on its walls — but looking for the money to keep the walls themselves. It has two weeks.

The center announced this week that ECA/ACES, which owns the John Slade Ely House on Trumbull Street out of which the Ely Center operates, put the building up for sale — and received an offer from a developer to buy the building as is, for $800,000.

The Ely Center has a chance to match the developer’s offer and stay in the building, if it can raise the funds by March 15.

“This is important for us to do as the stewards of Grace Ely’s legacy — a building that everyone has called home, that the arts community has called home,” said Ely Center founder and board President Jeanne Criscola.

Criscola has been involved with the arts activities in the house for decades. Its status as a home for visual arts in New Haven stretches back farther than that.

The Elizabethan mansion on Trumbull Street, built in 1901, was the home of John Slade Ely and Grace Taylor Ely. John died in 1906 at the age of 46. As the Ely Center’s website relates, ​“Grace, an active community member and supporter of the arts, left the house in trust as an art center for emerging contemporary art after her death in 1959. The first exhibition opened in April 1961 with works from New Haven Paint & Clay Club.”

In addition to being home to the New Haven Paint and Clay Club and the Brush and Palette Club, the John Slade Ely House was an incubator — ​“before people used the word ​‘incubator,’” said Debbie Hesse, the Ely Center’s board vice president — for other arts institutions in town. Artspace got its start there. In its earliest stages, Creative Arts Workshop operated out of the house’s basement.

“She was so ahead of her time, without seeking the limelight,” said board member Rashmi Talpade. ​“She understood that this was an important location in the city,” Criscola said, ​“and she wanted to leave something to her public, to the community, to New Haven… When people feel they’re a member of the New Haven community, it’s deep, and that was her.”

“She’s the inspiration for the Ely Center, completely,” Hesse said.

The arts organization around the John Slade Ely House faced a first crisis in 2015 when Wells Fargo, which manages Grace Ely’s trust, put the building up for sale. After a lengthy process involving the trust, the city, the state, and a nascent organization called the Friends of the John Slade Ely House, ECA/ACES agreed to buy the property in 2016. (Read about that here.)

“At that time, the city, the state, did not want to see this end up in Yale’s hands,” Criscola said, ​“though Yale is the third option in the will.”

By ​“the will,” Criscola meant the will of Grace Ely, whose intentions guided the sale of the property from her trust to ECA/ACES. ​“This will specifically states that she wants this building to be an arts center — a contemporary arts center — and that is what everyone should be trying to make sure it remains. She was a suffragette. She understood the public good, doing the best you can for your community.” The house ​“had to be sold to an arts organization or an arts school. ECA/ACES fit that role,” Criscola said.

At the time, the school was looking for more space in the neighborhood near its hub on the corner of Audubon and Orange for its visual arts program. ECA/ACES’s plan for the property, as outlined by ACES Executive Director Thomas Danehy, was to apply for money from the state to renovate the mansion, doing repairs and bringing the building up to code, so that it could hold high-school classes there during the school year. Before renovations began, the space could be used for art shows, as it had in the past. After renovations were completed, arts shows could be held when school wasn’t in session — either during school vacations or over the summer.

“So it looked like a win-win, with a lot of goodwill toward them coming in, applying for money from the state in order to renovate it, and to continue in some sort of an agreement with us, as the public who stood up to save this building and keep Grace Ely’s intentions alive.” Criscola said.

The Friends of the John Slade Ely House incorporated as a nonprofit, moved into the ECA/ACES-owned house, and rebranded themselves as the Ely Center of Contemporary Art. Since 2016, the Ely Center has leased the building from ACES, paying them out of its disbursement from the Grace Ely trust. Its activities are also funded by grants from the state and city, as well as grants from New Alliance Foundation and private donations.

Meanwhile, said Danehy, ECA/ACES met with stumbling blocks in its attempts to secure a school construction grant from the state. ​“We spent a lot of time and energy,” he said. It pulled its first application and resubmitted for funding the following year. The state deemed an early architectural plan for the school as having too much hallway space versus classroom space, and plans had to be redrawn. New Haven’s zoning board deemed that variances were needed to address parking issues as well as installing an elevator to make the building compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“There were a number of complications,” Danehy said. In the end, three years later, the state finally turned ECA/ACES down for a construction grant because it was a ​“small project,” and the prospective cost — which Danehy recalled being about $5 million — too high for the square footage of classroom space and number of students being served.

In short, ECA discovered that ​“we can’t use the building as a school space,” Danehy said. ​“In the meantime, we kept renting to Debbie and Jeanne,” and ​“they’ve been good tenants and we had a good working relationship.”

Criscola recalled that, at a hearing in probate court for the 2016 sale, Danehy had said that if ECA could not secure funding for renovations, it would sell the building. Danehy said that, if anything, the pandemic may have eased the need for ECA to sell, as students were at home and space wasn’t tight. Now, with students back in classrooms, ​“the Ely building no longer fits what we’re looking for,” Danehy said. ​“So we’re going to concentrate on refurbishing the original building” on Audubon Street — ECA has a 100-year lease there that ends in 2087 — and ​“looking at space that may be closer.”

“Our plans were well laid-out and well-intentioned,” Danehy said. But ​“there are greater needs in the original building.”

In January, Danehy said, ECA/ACES contacted Pearce Real Estate about selling the John Slade Ely House. Danehy said Pearce estimated the building’s current market value at about $800,000. Criscola said that on Jan. 27, the Ely Center and other stakeholders involved in the 2016 sale of the Ely House got an email from Danehy informing them that ECA/ACES was looking for a buyer for the building.

Shortly after, Hesse met with Danehy and other ECA/ACES representatives, along with Jackie Downing of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, to communicate, ​“in a friendly way,” that the Ely Center was interested in staying in the space. ACES, for its part, was interested in the Ely Center buying the property — for the suggested market value of $800,000.

“That sounds kind of high,” Hesse recalled Jackie Downing of the Community Foundation saying. Downing had mediated the discussions in 2016 that led to ECA/ACES buying the property, for $390,000.

But a few days later, on Feb. 9, ECA/ACES informed Criscola that they had received an offer through Pearce for the building — from Avi Lipsker of Tap Capital Partners, LCC — to buy the building as is for Pearce’s stated price of $800,000.

“I was expecting that it would sit on the market for a while, but this was all fast,” Danehy said.

ECA/ACES first, however, extended to the Ely Center a right of first refusal — the chance to buy the building first — if it can match the developer’s offer.

Criscola, Hesse, and Talpade understand ECA/ACES’s perspective regarding the sale. In a larger sense, however, they question the economic circumstances that have brought the Ely Center to facing such an enormous obstacle only six years into its operations.

“I think it’s shocking that a nonprofit arts organization has to compete with a developer,” Talpade said. And the Ely Center ​“is not just for the artists. As an organization, we are contributing a very valuable component to the city.”

“It’s like David and Goliath,” she continued. ​“That’s what we are competing with. And at what cost?”

Criscola noted that the Ely Center’s current situation is symptomatic of a broader trend in support for the arts. In decades past — the 1970s and 1980s — there was, in real dollar terms, more willingness to provide arts organizations with more startup money and resources than the Ely Center had to start with in 2016. ​“No matter how many Arts Councils or Community Foundations” there have been, she said, ​“the money has gotten tighter and tighter, with this idea that business can save the arts. Something’s wrong with the structure the way it is right now.”

“We need new models” for arts support, Hesse said.

“We’ve kept every one of the promises, every one of our intentions, we’ve kept,” Criscola said. ​“The city, state, Community Foundation, and ACES right now need to answer the question of whether they’ve held to what their intentions were at that time.”

At issue for the board of the Ely Center is not only the John Slade Ely House’s role as a gallery for contemporary art, but the preservation of the building itself. ​“The reason why this is so beloved by the artists and audiences that come in contact with this particular building is — look around. We frame contemporary art in an Elizabethan interior.”

“Very few arts organizations are the whole package the way this one is,” Talpade said. ​“You get a historic, beautiful place, very unique opportunites, very high-quality programming…. We are growing. We are becoming more entrenched in the community. So what we are offering is only getting better and reaching wider audiences. We’re on the right path and there is so much to look forward to.”

The Ely Center has exhibits scheduled through June and ECA/ACES has agreed that, even if the building is sold, those shows can go on. ​“We want to stay true to the agreement we’ve made with the tenants,” Danehy said. Meanwhile, in the wake of the board’s announcement earlier this week, it has heard from friends of the organization and neighbors of the building who are interested in helping them retain the building, though it’s still very preliminary.

“All we need is the one right person,” Criscola said.

The Ely Center is holding a reception for its next show, ​“Undercurrents,” this Sunday from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., with a discussion at 4 p.m. to talk about the prospects for purchasing and remaining in the building.

“We’re putting all our energy and focus” into that at the moment, Hesse said. ​“We’re not thinking about other possibilities yet.”