Can New Owners Revive This Prime Lot?

New owners of a Whalley Avenue corner lot face a challenge that has defied their predecessors for over 20 years: Turning prime real estate on New Haven’s busiest commercial thoroughfare into something more than fenced-in dirt.

The stubbornly vacant lot sits at the corner of Whalley and Winthrop.

According to the online city land records database, on March 25, Congregation BH Inc. purchased 352 Whalley Ave., 420 Winthrop Ave. and 422 Winthrop Ave. from Mast Equities LLC for $400,000.

Those three adjacent vacant properties — covering 0.63 acres — last sold for a combined total of $259,109 in 2000. They were last appraised by the city as worth $113,100.

Congregation BH Inc. is a nonprofit controlled by New Haven-based landlords Chaim Vail and Yakov Borenstein.

Neither Vail nor Borenstein could be reached for comment by the publication time of this article.

“A Nice, Little Restaurant”? New Apartments?

Whalley Avenue neighbors and city officials have identified the vacant corner lot as a prime piece of real estate that could be put to more productive use than an empty patch of fenced-in grass for nearly 20 years. During an early 2020 community meeting about the rezoning of Whalley Avenue, city officials and neighbors discussed this very lot as exactly the type of property where the city hoped to incentivize construction by changing its land use regulations to promote dense, walkable, and environmentally sustainable development.

When asked this week what they would like to see next at this long-vacant lot now that it has a new owner for the first time in two decades, Whalley Avenue neighbors and city development officials pitched everything from new restaurants to housing to a playground for neighborhood kids.

“We need more, different food,” said Lynel Caply, who grew up on Ashmun Street and has spent much of his adult life living near Whalley Avenue.

“Maybe a Spanish restaurant? I wish it was a nice, little restaurant.”

Two other men who were standing near the site on Tuesday afternoon said they’d like to see a basketball court, or a playground, or places to play chess.

“Something for the kids,” said one, who gave his name as Gotti. ​“Something for the community.”

Both men recalled that the commercial building that formerly stood at that site at the corner of Whalley and Winthrop used to be home to a popular soul food restaurant called, Mother’s.

Whalley-Edgewood-Beaver Hills (WEB) Community Management Team Chair Nadine Horton called the new owner of the lot to get in touch with neighbors.

“Come talk to us, see what we would like to see,” she said. The management team and the Whalley Avenues Special Services District (WASSD) have a close working relationship, she said, and believe strongly that the best route towards building ​“a viable neighborhood and businesses wanted by the community” is through collaboration.

“With that particular spot, what we would love to see there is some type of mixed use,” she continued, ​“in terms of apartments at the top and office space and a sit-down restaurant.” .

She noted that Whalley Avenue has plenty of fast food restaurants. ​“We do not have a lot of sit-down restaurants.” This could be a good spot for one.

She said she’s wary not knowing anything about the new landlords, even though she is excited about the land changing hands for the first time in 20 years.

City Deputy Economic Development Administrator Steve Fontana told the Independent that, while he too is not familiar with the new owners, ​“having worked with residents and business owners on the Whalley Avenue Main Streets Committee to improve the corridor … the community has been and remains very interested in seeing that property redeveloped.”

He said community members have expressed interest in seeing a mixed-use building, with apartments above and commercial uses ranging from retail to a coffee shop/bakery to a family-style sit-down restaurant on the first floor. But they and the city are open to other options as well.

The ​“community first would like to have the opportunity to exchange ideas with the new owners on what they would like to see there (and perhaps what they would not like to see there),” Fontana wrote.

“The City, through my department and the Livable City Initiative, would welcome the opportunity to meet with the new owners to facilitate this conversation. We have solid relationships both with the residents and the business owners in the district, and are prepared to help developers of a proposed project through both the community engagement and land-use regulatory processes.”

From Residential To Chicken Joints To Soul Seafood To Demolition

Curious to know a bit more about the history of this parcel in particular, and of this stretch of Whalley Avenue in general, the Independent asked New Haven Museum Director of Photo Archives and local micro-history author Jason Bischoff-Wurstle to do a bit of sleuthing.

He found that this two-decade-empty spot did indeed have a rich culinary history — and, before that, a deeper residential past.

For context, he provided a few photos of nearby Whalley Avenue spots to show how the current commercial strip used to be predominantly residential. (See above for a photo of 323 Whalley Ave., across the street from the 352 Whalley Ave. lot, in 1936.)

Looking at 1888 and 1911 Sanborn insurance maps, Bischoff-Wurstle said that that corner of Winthrop and Whalley once held two wooden residential buildings.

“It seems like it was residential at one point, and then it switched over.”

Most of the extant buildings in that area were built in the 1920s and 1930s, he continued.

In the early 1960s, whatever building stood at the 352 Whalley Ave. site likely held a commercial cleaner business.

From 1966 to 1974, it was home to a restaurant called Chicken Delight. From 1974 to 1980, it housed a different restaurant called Chicken Delux.

Then from 1980 to 1991, the spot ditched the chicken business and was home to a restaurant called The Cheese Wedge.

That restaurant was replaced by Soulfood Seafood, he said, which last appeared at 352 Whalley in 1999.

For a bit of late 19th century visual context, Bischoff-Wurstle shared a photo of Whalley Avenue looking west from Garden Street from around 1885. Garden Street is roughly six blocks east of Winthrop.

The picture shows ​“homes from the colonial settlement,” as Bischoff-Wurstle put it, looking out on a dirt road with trolley tracks running down the middle.

“The trolley was still horse drawn in the 1880s,” Bischoff-Wurstle told the Independent, ​“and the tracks ran along that side of the street from Fair Haven to Westville.

So. Who Are The New Owners?

While Congregation BH Inc. does not appear to own any other properties in New Haven, Vail and Borenstein aren’t newcomers to New Haven real estate.

According to the Independent’s tracking of city property transactions over the past two and a half years, various holding companies controlled by Vail, Borenstein, and fellow investor Yonah Schwartz — including Hawk LLC and New Haven Community Development LLC — have spent over $10.5 million purchasing over 80 units of housing in everywhere from Edgewood to Beaver Hills to Newhallville to the Hill to Fair Haven to Jocelyn Square.

According to a recent Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract (EO BMF) retained by the IRS, Congregation BH Inc had $262,401 in assets and $444,346 in income in 2019.

And according to the investigative news outlet ProPublica, the company has nine employees and received $20,265 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) grant money last summer.

The company that has owned the Whalley-Winthrop lot, meanwhile, is Mast Equities LLC.

The Secretary of the State’s business registry database lists that shell company’s business address as Astoria, New York, and lists the company’s principal as Maria Kourakos of Glastonbury.

Mast Equities purchased the adjacent properties in May 2000. And, according to the city building permit online database, the company knocked down a former two-story commercial structure at that site in June 2003.

Mandy Drops Another $2.23M On 23 Apts

In other recent local property transactions, between March 2 and March 18, holding companies associated with the local megalandlord Mandy Management spent another $2.23 million buying 10 different one-family, two-family, and three-family homes containing a total of 23 different units of housing.

Those recent Mandy buys were at 18 Dayton St., 639 Elm St., 77 Truman St., 688 Dixwell Ave., 92 Carmel St., 84 Elizabeth St., 38 Lander St., 552 Dixwell Ave., 46 Arthur St., and 40 Read St.

In West River, on March 12, Norton Street Apartments LLC — a company controlled by local landlord Matthew Harp — purchased the 12-unit apartment building at 1 Norton St. from 1 Norton LLC — a company controlled by Pike International’s Shmully Hecht.

The property last sold for $600,000 in 2014, and the city last appraised it as worth $631,200.

And on March 11 and March 17, three different holding companies controlled by Stamford-based investor Avraham Lipsker spent more than $2.3 million buying three downtown buildings.

Those include the five-unit mixed-use building at 55 Trumbull St., and a combined 9 units of offices and apartments in the adjacent buildings at 265 and 267 Orange St.