Thomas Breen FIle Photo
133 Hamilton: From storied factory to affordable housing complex?
The city’s public housing authority plans to purchase the New Haven Clock Company building on Hamilton Street and convert it into 100 mixed-income, mostly-affordable apartments — but only after the abandoned factory’s current owners rid the property of all remaining toxins.
The Housing Authority of New Haven’s Board of Commissioners authorized the public housing agency to purchase the storied and long-vacant clock factory for $4.5 million during its monthly meeting on Tuesday in a 360 Orange St. conference room.
The factory building’s owner, an LLC affiliate of the Oregon-based developer Reed Community Partners, has been slated to lose the historic property in a foreclosure sale, after failing to pay over $235,000 in city taxes. The company has until Dec. 16 to sell the property ahead of a scheduled auction.
For years, Reed Community Partners had hoped to transform the factory into 130 affordable housing units, including some set aside for artists. A series of financial and structural twists thwarted this plan. In addition to accruing substantial tax debt, the city cited the owners multiple times for unsafe and unsightly conditions — including a collapsing wall, falling bricks, leaking oil drums, debris, and blight. The current owners also spent several months in court in 2018 and 2019 trying to evict the building’s last remaining tenant, a strip club. (Reed Community Partners did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)
Laura Glesby Photo
Elm City Communities/Housing Authority President Karen DuBois-Walton.
Karen DuBois-Walton, the president of the Housing Authority and its affiliated nonprofits (collectively known as Elm City Communities), said that the Housing Authority of New Haven will initially purchase the building, while its nonprofit arm 360 Management will likely acquire and run the new apartments.
The Housing Authority has agreed to purchase the building on the condition that Reed Community Partners complete remediation of the site beforehand, according to Elm City Communities Vice President Shenae Draughn.
“We are extremely excited about this opportunity,” Draughn told commissioners on Tuesday.
Commissioner Erik Clemons praised the planned acquisition. “It’s a great idea,” he said. “That property’s been sitting there. Well done.”
The sale authorization received unanimous approval from commissioners.
From left: Housing Authority Commissioners William Kilpatrick, Alberta Witherspoon, and Danya Keene.
“I love the reuse of an old building,” DuBois-Walton said after the meeting. “There’s character. It’s such a meaningful place in New Haven.”
The building is simultaneously an emblem of the industrial economy that once powered New Haven and the underground arts culture that thrived in the 90s, as Jason Bischoff-Wurstle documented in a recent New Haven Museum exhibit.
In its life as a factory from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, the building was a work site for over 1,500 people making clocks for the New Haven Clock Company.
Courtesy of New Haven Museum
The factory on Armistice Day, 1918.
Courtesy of Dimitri Rimsky
The Petaleurs, a mime troup led by Dimitri Rimsky, lived and worked in the factory.
By the 1970s, the factory had closed and the artists had moved in. Creatives including a group of mimes and an artist-activist collective worked and in some cases even lived in the industrial buildings. The former factory housed a punk and R&B cafe, an LGBTQ+ club, a skate park, a “Sex Ball” for New England architecture students, and a strip club.
Now, DuBois-Walton and her colleagues envision the building’s next life as an affordable housing hub — an extension of a long-brewing vision for the Mill River neighborhood’s industrial remnants.
DuBois-Walton noted that old clock factory is located steps away from Mill River Crossing, a set of recently-renovated, mostly-below-market apartments built by an Elm City Communities nonprofit. The building, formerly known as Farnam Courts, used to be a public housing complex known for its deteriorating conditions.
She added that the factory purchase would add about 100 apartments, mostly rented below the market rate, to New Haven’s housing stock — which she said would help address the city’s affordability crisis, as Elm City Communities recently distilled in its “Breaking Ground” policy report.
Elm City Communities is currently crunching the numbers as to how many of the proposed 100 units at the clock shop would be “affordable,” and what exactly “affordable” will mean. (In the latest addition to Mill River Crossing, about 84 percent of units were rented below-market rate, primarily to families making 25, 50, and 60 percent of the Area Median Income.)
Though the building will include some market-rate units, DuBois-Walton said, “it will be mostly affordable, ’cause that’s what we do.”
