Back To Square 1 On Crown Garage Space

Long Wharf Theatre has officially dropped its plans to build out a new performance venue in a vast, vacant publicly-owned commercial space on Crown Street — leaving the city’s parking authority prepared to put the space up for rent on the open market to try to attract some new business to the heart of downtown.

At Monday night’s regular monthly Park New Haven meeting in the city parking authority’s headquarters at 232 George St., city transit chief and Park New Haven Acting Executive Director Doug Hausladen said he plans to recommend that the board hire a real estate broker to try to attract a new tenant for the nearly 10,000 square-foot, publicly-owned commercial space on the ground floor of the Crown Street Garage.

The owners of the College Street Music Hall initially planned to build out a new mid-sized concert venue in that space after they won a months-long public bid contest in November.

They subsequently dropped those plans in January, leaving the bid process’s runner-up and only other applicant, a consortium consisting of Long Wharf Theatre, the Shubert Theatre, and Albertus Magnus College, with the opportunity to enter into a lease with the parking authority to build out a planned new 200-seat theater, 90-seat cabaret, and rehearsal studio.

At Monday night’s meeting, Hausladen said that he received final word from Long Wharf Theatre several weeks ago that they are no longer interested in pursuing that second theater project in the Crown Street Garage space.

In a phone interview Tuesday morning, Long Wharf Theatre Board Chair Laura Pappano confirmed that she had given Hausladen word about the theater pulling out of the project in mid-September.

The reason, she said, is simple: The long-vacant space, built in 1974 and formerly home to the Alchemy night club, would have cost too much to repair and rebuild.

Pappano said that Long Wharf representatives met with construction estimators in early September who costed out the theater-cabaret-studio project for the space in question. They told Long Wharf that the project would cost $18-$19 million to complete.

“That kind of answered things for us,” she said. After talking with the Shubert’s John Fisher and Albertus Magnus’s Marc Camille, she said, the consortium decided to discontinue its bid.

“I think that the dollars just made it absolutely impossible.”

“I continue to think that it’s a great location to have a performing are center,” she said. But the cost, at least for Long Wharf and its partners, was prohibitive.

On Monday night, Hausladen said that he plans on recommending to the parking authority commissions at an upcoming meeting that, instead of going through another public Request for Proposal (RFP) process, it hire a professional broker, put the property up on a Multiple Listing Service (MLS), and see what happens.

“Everyone we’ve talked to through the bid process has said one thing: ​‘Too big. Too expensive. Too much, too much, too much,’” Hausladen said.

Not every entity that works on putting together real estate transactions looks at RFPs, he said. Some are only looking at MLS posts to see what’s available on the open market.

“With no better idea,” he said, ​“and with no magic funding, let’s put it out there.” It’ll be the equivalent of hanging a For Rent sign on the property, he said, and seeing who calls.

In theory, he said, the parking authority could convert the space into more parking spots. But that would be antithetical to the mission of the city’s economic development team and, likely, the desire of the parking authority’s board.

“It’s been a long, arduous process to get the property back,” he said about the parking authority’s years of legal wrangling with its past tenant, which finally ended in the spring of 2018.

After all of the ups and downs of the public bid process, he said, the parking authority still has no one lined up to use the space.

Hiring a broker to market the space, he said, is the smartest way of ​“getting back onto a new course.”