Surprise! Downtown Gets … Another Smoke Shop

A former Orange Street hair salon has newly opened its doors as a smoke shop. 

Several months after a former Chapel Street cellphone store shuttered to become a smoke shop. 

Not long after the former Ann Taylor on the Green cycled through its afterlife as a rapid Covid testing site to become — wait for it — a smoke shop.

Those are a handful of the proliferating downtown storefronts where passersby can stop in and buy bongs or vapes or rolling papers or a diverse array of other smoking paraphernalia.

While not all sell tobacco, they all focus on selling the equipment used to light up and inhale the nicotine-laden carcinogen as well as recently legalized adult-use pot.

Some of the downtown smoke shop staffers the Independent spoke with over the course of a few walk-in visits Monday cited a hotly competitive marketplace where near-adjacent retailers look to attract customers by slashing prices and, in one case, blasting bouncy pop music to create a more fun vibe. They also spoke of adult-use cannabis’s legalization as encouraging more customers to try out their products. 

Meanwhile, a Yale psychiatrist and two pastors-cultural ambassadors took to the WNHH airwaves Monday to renew their public call warning of the dire health consequences of smoking — and to describe how the proximity of smoke shops is one factor in leading to people, especially young people, picking up the hazardous habit.

The four-block stretch of Chapel Street between State and College now boasts four such smoke shop retailers.

Two sit side by side across the street from the Elm City Market grocery store, right beneath the downtown commercial relic that is the Loft’s Candies sign. 

A few blocks away, another, which opened in the spring of 2022, now stands in the former Ann Taylor store right across from the Green.

Still another, which opened last November, now occupies a former T‑Mobile cellphone store in one of the Green-fronting groundfloor storefronts of the old Chapel Square Mall.

The newest entry to downtown’s smoke shop-apalooza is a few blocks north, on Orange Street near Grove, in the same space where Egidio’s Hair Studio stood for so many years.

City land records show that an affiliate of the megalandlord Mandy Management bought that 12-unit mixed-use retail and apartment building at 340 Orange St. for $1.55 million from a holding company controlled by Lorraine and Egidio Severini last December.

As of Sunday, that ex-salon once owned by the building’s ex-landlord is now a smoke shop replete with candy, papers, and glass pieces.

Mohamed Lamine was behind the counter when this reporter stopped by Monday. He said the shop had a few customers trickle in during its opening day on Sunday. Monday customer traffic thus far had been pretty slow. He otherwise declined to comment on why so many such shops have opened downtown more broadly, and why the shop he now works for opened in this commercial spot in particular.

Outside and inside of the Grab N’ Go Mart Smoke Shop at 784 Chapel, customer Meechie Hyman and staffer Mo Ali had a bit more to say about this smoker commercial moment.

This shop is ​“really convenient,” Hyman offered. ​“It’s accessible. Flexible.”

He described the smoke shops on Chapel as fitting in with the other retailers on the block, like the grocery store and the beauty supply store, as creating a row of shops that encourages people to get out of their cars, walk around downtown New Haven, and spend some money.

As long as the shops and its customers ​“aren’t bothering anybody,” he said, he has no problem with them being here.

Behind the register inside the shop, Ali said business is ​“not too crazy” at the smoker storefront he has worked at for the past two years. He noted that ​“people are trying to open up” lots of such shops in the area now. Why? Probably just because there’s money to be made.

Hassan Shaif had offered a similar take from behind the counter of Anesthesia smoke shop in the old Ann Taylor site.

Why so are so many smoke shops opening downtown? ​“Money,” he replied.

He said that business at the shop he works at has been ​“not that busy” as of late. ​“Before, we used to be good,” he said. But now, competition from other stores means that fewer customers are coming to his location.

Nadine Ortiz had a strategy in mind to attract customers to the recently opened Chapel Smoke Shop at 908 Chapel St. a block away.

She had a speaker stationed in the shop’s corner, blasting Lana Del Rey’s ​“West Coast Genius” onto the Green through the store’s open front door.

“The Green makes it busy,” she said about her shop. She said many college students come by. So do elderly customers looking interested in trying newly legalized cannabis for the first time and wanting to buy equipment.

“I think vaping and smoking have become very big,” she said. She said she always has to be on the lookout to bar high-schoolers and other too-young people from the shop. She worries that some of the vaping and smoking products are especially designed to be attractive to young people with their bright colors and flavors. She said she regularly turns people away who she knows are too young to be buying smoking goods.

What about the other shops nearby? ​“It’s very competitive,” she admitted. Thus her trying out the speaker and pop music to try to distinguish her store.

One customer, Jose Perez, found the shop appealing enough to walk on in and buy a watermelon-flavored Air Bar Monday. He took a vaping puff before he left the store.

“I like this one,” he said about the Chapel Smoke Shop. ​“The people are nice.” It’s clean, he added. A good place to shop.

Meanwhile, also on Monday, Yale Assistant Professor of Psychiatry Krysten Bold and Pastor Leroy Perry Jr. and Rev. Elvin Clayton joined WNHH radio host Tom Ficklin for an episode all about menthol cigarettes, e‑cigarettes, and the health consequences of smoking.

“Tobacco use is really the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States,” Bold said. ​“Each year, over half a million deaths are attributable to tobacco use.” She said she has made her life’s work trying to reduce the harms and consequences of tobacco use because of ​“how many more lives would be saved, good years added to life” if people didn’t smoke.

“It’s totally preventable,” she said. ​“If we can help people quit,” we should do everything we can to do just that. ​“Quitting smoking is the single best thing you can do for your health today and in the future.”

Ficklin pressed Bold on what factors contribute to a person’s smoking habits.

For one, Bold said, menthol flavor in cigarettes make them easier to smoke and harder to quit. 

She also said her research looks at ​“systemic disparities,” the way that Black and brown communities in particular have been targeted with ​“more ad exposure and more stores in these communities.”

“We know that there’s more stores near schools in these communities,” she continued. ​“When ads and stores selling cigarettes are closer to high schools, more high schoolers smoke, and there’s more access and use at a younger age.” Getting people hooked on smoking young often leads to them staying smokers for longer.

“One thing important to remember” when thinking about quitting, Bold said, is ​“they didn’t start smoking overnight. It’s years and years practice of smoking.” The same is true for quitting. One has to work at it. ​“Just because something didn’t work one time doesn’t mean it’s a total failure.”

Rev. Perry agreed. ​“We’re trying to get rid of gun violence. This is just as violent as gun violence,” he said during Monday’s interview. ​“A million people are dying. When will we wake up, America, and look at the things that are attacking our children, our citizens, and do something.”

It’s so important to get the word out about the health hazards of smoking, he said. And ​“the best way to help them is to keep them from starting in the first place.”

Click on the video above to watch the interview in full.