Thomas Breen photos
50 Ives Pl.
Two concrete emblems of the delivery economy are taking shape atop a site of New Haven’s manufacturing past.
That active construction scene is located at 50 Ives Pl..
The nearly 4.4‑acre site sits on the eastern edge of Wooster Square, and is bounded by East Street, Chapel Street, South Wallace Street, and Ives Place.
It was once home to the H.B. Ives manufacturing plant, which for decades produced Home Depot-bound goods like house numbers and window locks — and which shut its doors in 2009.
After a decade of sitting vacant and unused, the site is now on its way to hosting a new industrial use: two new “high-bay” storage warehouses.
Elm City Industrial Properties, Inc. image
A rendering of what the new warehouses would look like from South Wallace Street.
Zoom file image
Richard Cuomo Zooms in to an October 2020 community management team meeting.
Those are currently being built by Richard Cuomo of the North Haven-based Elm City Industrial Properties. Cuomo’s company purchased the Ives Place property for $750,000 in May 2020. His company won site plan approval for the project City Plan Commission in October 2020. And in March 2021, his company pulled a building permit estimating the cost of construction at $2.8 million.
“We got started after some delays in getting materials. Hopefully that’s behind us,” Cuomo told the Independent in a Thursday afternoon phone interview about the ongoing warehouse construction site. “By the end of the year, we plan on being completed.”
When Cuomo first pitched the two-warehouse plan to the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team in October 2020, he and his attorney estimated that each of the two buildings would have enough space to load 20 delivery trucks at once. He also said at the time that the Covid-19 pandemic and the surge in online shopping only underscored the importance of warehouses, storage, and distribution sites in the ever-growing delivery economy.
Asked on Thursday if he has any commercial tenants lined up to rent space in these warehouses when construction is finished, Cuomo said, “We’re talking to a few different tenants. Nothing concrete yet.”
Typically, he said, delivery-based businesses don’t start looking for warehouse space until 180 days or so before they need it. He said he expects to bring in long-term tenants — but knows that he won’t have to have a lease signed quite yet in order to have these warehouses full.
“There’s still a lot of demand, and not a lot of product” in the warehouse world, he said. “We’ll see. It’s all about finding the right tenant, something that’s a good fit for the buildings.”
What kinds of businesses might end up renting out these spaces?
“These are high-bay warehouses, strictly storage,” Cuomo said. “Somebody that has a large volume of product that needs to be stored and distributed throughout New England” would be a good fit for the site. He said that could mean anything from “auto parts to food stuffs” could be stored in these warehouses.
Cuomo said that his business is still feeling a Covid-induced construction supply chain crunch, as they struggle to find several “critical materials” like roof insulation and a fire pump that are still needed to complete construction.
You can probably rent out a warehouse that’s not painted, he said. But you can’t rent out a warehouse that doesn’t have a roof.
As for the location on Ives Place, he said, “I don’t think I could find a better space.” Just a few blocks aware from the highway, it’ll be easy to reach for trucks looking to distribute whatever goods end up being stored on site.
During a recent city Development Commission meeting, city Deputy Economic Development Administration Carlos Eyzaguirre also offered a brief update on the Ives Place warehouses — and praised Cuomo for building up a business that will likely succeed at a difficult-to-develop former manufacturing site.
Cuomo is a veteran of the warehouse industry, Eyzaguirre said, having built other such spaces in New Haven and North Haven. “He is putting up two warehouses on 50 Ives Pl. that be bays where different light assembly companies can rent space,” he said.
“It’s been a very hard site to develop, because of it’s former industrial use. I think it’s a really good development for the neighborhood.”
In a city that needs affordable housing, this is truly the best the City could come up with? I mean, really? This was the winner. Ok.