Building Boom Crew Taps New Haven Roots

Two city-raised HVAC contractors took a step out of the shadows of New Haven’s building boom and into the limelight to be honored for their ground-up-construction plumbing work — including at hundreds of new Yale medical campus-adjacent apartments that continue to spring up across the Hill.

Those New Haveners, Henry Smith III and Lawrence Jay McLaurin of the North Haven-based FAD Mechanical, gathered Friday afternoon in the front lobby of the new 223-unit Pierpont at City Crossing apartment building at 9 Tower Ln. to be recognized as the federal Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Connecticut and New England Minority-Owned Small Business of the Year.

Smith grew up in West Rock’s Rockview apartments. McLaurin grew up on Starr Street. On hand Friday to laud them and their 22-employee full-service plumbing, heating, and air conditioning company were U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewiecz, SBA Connecticut District Office Director Catherine Marx, and North Haven State Sen. Paul Cicarella.

“You are a great Connecticut success story. A great American success story,” Blumenthal said. ​“That’s why you’re being celebrated by the SBA.”

“Our mission,” Smith said, is to ​“keep pushing through, build our communities, and be an asset to our state.”

“You are doing that,” Bysiewicz said with praise, ​“literally and figuratively.”

The press conference took place on the ground floor of a new residential building that Smith’s and McLaurin’s company spent two years working on, installing the pipes and showers and sinks.

The ​“Pierpont,” which opened last January, is one of a handful of new apartment buildings that FAD Mechanical has worked on in Stamford developer Randy Salvatore’s three-phase, five-building Hill to Downtown redevelopment effort. The company recently wrapped up working on 270 more Salvatore-built apartments in downtown Hartford. And it’s currently on the job on Lafayette Street in the Hill for still another new 112 units of Salvatore-developed apartments, and a few blocks away on the 200-unit Spinnaker-led development at the ex-Coliseum site.

“It’s hard work out here,” Smith said. ​“Being a minority contractor is not easy. It seems like everything we do, we got to do it two times harder.”

That’s true for getting access to big construction project opportunities, he said, as well as securing enough capital and financing and hiring and training enough employees necessary to make their work on those projects possible. 

“We keep building,” he continued. ​“We keep trying to help our community. We’re from New Haven, born and raised. It’s our duty to help the youth and even help the formerly incarcerated. We don’t discriminate.”

He added that FAD has projects that add up to 600 to 700 new apartments coming up. ​“We need help. We’re trying to hire guys and gals to put these buildings up and keep building the brand.” FAD started out as a ​“small mom and pop shop,” he said. ​“Now we’re growing.”

“We’re just going to keep pushing,” McLaurin added. ​“Hopefully we’ll have this meeting again some day” to celebrate still more new buildings — and all the contracting work that goes into each — completed and opened and occupied.

“Thank you for being role models for our young people,” Bysiewicz said, ​“who look to you and see what determined, tenacious business people can do.”

Ernest Pagan, a local carpenters union president and City Plan Commission member. grew up with Smith in Rockview and helped connect FAD with some of the downtown developers they’re now working with. Pagan showed up to support his longtime friends and construction-industry colleagues on Friday.

“I feel proud,” Pagan said — about FAD Mechanical being honored for their good work, and about local contractors getting the jobs to help build up all of these new New Haven developments.

What about the Pierpont building itself?

Tiasha Smith, who works in the Pierpont’s leasing office, said that roughly 200 of the building’s 223 apartments are currently occupied. 

She said that most of the residents at this building — and at the other roughly half-dozen Salvatore-build complexes in the area — are Yale affiliated, many of them med school residents and their families.

One of the Pierpont’s current tenants is Yale School of Public Health student Larissa Chia. On Friday, she had just gotten back from taking one of her final exams of the semester and stuck around in the building’s lobby to watch the HVAC contractor award ceremony.

Chia said she likes living in the Pierpont, and has renewed her lease for another year, despite the cost. Studios and one-bedroom apartments range from $2,300 to $2,700 per month, she said.

That said, she likes living in a brand new building. She said she gets along well with the neighbors she has met so far, and feels like she’s part of a broader Yale community. Next up this summer: a job as Mass General hospital in Boston, before returning to New Haven for one more year in public health school — and one more year at the Pierpont.