Music-Lovers Hit The Mic For Monterey Deal

Can the memory of Charlie Parker breathe new life into a controversial plan to publicly acquire a blighted former jazz club as part of a $1.3 million deal with an oft-cited megalandlord?

Elicker Administration officials and Dixwell Avenue cultural boosters gave it a try as they invoked the name of the late, great saxophone player — as well as the memories of fellow 20th-century musical titans like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk — in a bid to win public support for a tentative deal still making its way through the gears of city government.

Mayor Justin Elicker and Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Arlevia Samuel made that pitch during a Monday afternoon press conference held outside of the derelict former Monterey Jazz Club at 265 Dixwell Ave.

Joined by Monk Youth Jazz and Steam Collective, Inc., Founder Marcella Monk Flake, local jazz instructor and city Cultural Affairs Commission member Jesse Hameen Jr., Beulah Heights Land Development Corporation Chief Operating Officer Darrell Brooks, and Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church Pastor Kelcy Steele, Elicker and Samuel hosted the press conference in support of the city’s plans to buy four rundown properties on Dixwell Avenue from affiliates of Ocean Management for a combined sum of $1.3 million.

That deal to publicly acquire 262, 263, 265 and 269 Dixwell Ave. — at a price well above the properties’ city-appraised values and previous purchase prices — is currently before the LCI Board of Directors, which put a pause on the proposal in December amid a debate over how best to revitalize the Dixwell neighborhood without rewarding a megalandlord for bad behavior. The proposed jazz club purchase also comes as a number of other nearby properties, like Dixwell Plaza and the Q House community center, have been or are in the process of being redeveloped.

The LCI board is scheduled to take back up the Ocean-LCI land deal on Wednesday night. If the proposal wins a favorable recommendation from the LCI board, it will then be up to the Board of Alders to take a final vote on whether or not to approve the deal.

“These parcels have sat blighted like this for over a decade,” Samuel said during Monday’s presser. ​“There’s obviously no intention by the current owner to do anything to them, to improve the looks or utilization of them.”

Monday’s rain-laden conference was held outside the decaying jazz club itself.

“Everytime I drive by here my heart flutters,” Jesse Hameen Jr. said. ​“The Monterey was not the only jazz club on Dixwell, but the Monterey was like the hub… I met so many great musicians here.”

Marcella Monk Flake, a relative of the late jazz pianist Thelonius Monk, said that she and friend Dee Dee Greenlee, the daughter of Rufus Greenlee, who owned the Monterey before its closure, welcomed the city’s purchase proposal, stating the pair were ​“ecstatic to know this property will be preserved, that it’ll be utilized to educate, to preserve history, and to partially revitalize the Dixwell community.”

It is currently unclear how the Monterey Jazz Club will actually be used and redeveloped if the city does follow through on purchasing the property. LCI’s Arlevia Samuel, who negotiated the tentative deal with Ocean Management, said that she and the city administration more broadly hope to leave that decision up to the community.

Samuel spotted that the property was up for sale alongside a larger portfolio of properties listed by Ocean Management last summer. The city is planning to purchase not only the jazz club at 265 Dixwell Ave. but the adjacent and also abandoned deli at 269 Dixwell Ave. and two multi-family homes located at 262 and 263 Dixwell Ave. for a total of $1.3 million.

The focus of the deal has always been, according to Samuel and Elicker, acquiring the club for the sake of saving history that could otherwise be destoryed. 

Samuel said the city agreed to buy 262 and 263 Dixwell as part of this deal after Ocean — which controls over 1,000 mostly low-income apartments across the city and whose principal has been fined in court three times over the past year due to persistent housing-code violations at other of his company’s local properties — required that the city buy the Monterey building as part of a four-property package deal.

On Monday, Mayor Elicker said that the city will immediately dispose of the residential properties upon acquisition by handing them over to the Beulah Land Development Corporation, a nonprofit affiliated with Dixwell’s Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church. That nonprofit developer will either maintain the apartments as affordable units or transition the buildings into properties open to affordable homeownership.

Pastor Brooks himself hailed the potential acquisition Monday as a continuation of the work Beulah and the city have been doing to both revitalize the Dixwell corridor and establish housing during the affordability crisis. 

“I must confess, my first love is gospel,” Brooks said. ​“But a very close second is jazz. My dad told me there was a time when people would drive their cars very slowly down Dixwell to celebrate community, to celebrate family… it’s an honor to be a part of the community that’s bringing that luster back to Dixwell.” 

He pointed to Beulah’s recent work development 340 Dixwell into 69 new rental units, the first majority-affordable housing complex in New Haven to be made with a mass timber structure system. 

“I’m excited about the renaissance happening here at Dixwell.”

Elicker: These Dixwell Properties Have A "Strategic Value" To The City

During the second half of the presser, Samuel and Elicker fielded questions concerning the implications of opting to pay over a million dollars to a landlord with a track record of sitting on properties for a profit and leaving potential housing in disarray.

She said the city was ​“fortunate” enough to be in a position to buy the properties using federal Community Development Block Grant funds, which the city received back in 2021. Those funds are set to expire this April. If the city does not buy the Monterey, she said, another developer could buy up the historic site and either sit on the property for longer or convert it into a use that wouldn’t benefit the surrounding community.

Elicker said using the limited funds to buy the jazz club was the best option currently open to the city. Although the properties are indeed blighted, he said that eminent domain, for example, would mean that the city would have to undergo a ​“lengthy legal process” while still paying the property’s worth and potentially ​“tying up the property for years and years.”

Asked why the city would agree to pay Ocean Management almost three times as much as the landlord originally paid for all four parcels back in 2016 and 2017 and over $400,000 more than the properties’ collective tax-appraised value, Elicker said that ​“I don’t think it’s a fair assumption to say we’re overpaying on these properties compared to other properties.”

“We reviewed other comparable property sales in this area for two-family homes and they’re about the same increase from the appraised values as these properties are,” he said. ​“And we’re not doing this all over the city. A lot of the Ocean portfolio was for sale and we didn’t purchase most of those properties because they weren’t of strategic value to us.”

He said relieving a major throughway of blighted properties would significantly ​“uplift the entire Dixwell Avenue corridor” and that ​“if we weren’t willing to pay above appraised price we wouldn’t be able to acquire pretty much anything anyone in the city had to offer.”

However, both Samuel and Elicker agreed that the city has work to do in making sure that properties owned specifically by large landlords are well maintained.

“It’s a challenge that we face all around the city,” Elicker acknowledged. ​“There’s a handful of large companies that are acquiring tons and tons of residential properties in particular all over the city and they aren’t always the best landlords.”

Samuel and LCI have successfully brought such landlords, like Ocean, to court, he said, where they receive fines in the thousands. He also drew attention to the city’s move to demand all landlords of multi-family properties register their names and contact information with the city to diminish landlord’s abilities to ​“hide behind LLCs.” He also noted that the city is working to create a land bank that will allow the city to identify and buy up important properties before potentially bad actors get to them first. Samuel added that she is in discussions with city representatives to edit the ordinance dictating what LCI ​“can or cannot do,” including finding ​“more effective ways to take hold of blighted properties.”

“Ultimately we can’t prevent someone from buying a property,” Elicker said. ​“This is a free country… but we can put a lot of checks and balances on how people maintain those properties to ensure that they’re doing so in a respectful way.”

He concluded: ​“I think we can all say there’s more work to do there.”