Daggett Factory Conversion Advances

After a month-long delay, a developer looking to put 80 new apartments in a former factory on Daggett Street has an agreement with its neighbor for an easement and the approval of the City Plan Commission.

Commissioners during their regular monthly meeting last week at City Hall approved a site plan for the conversion of the former Seamless Rubber Co. complex into new apartments and a special permit to allow 47 parking spaces.

In December, commissioners sent developers operating as 69 – 76 Daggett Street LLC to work out an agreement over an easement over a small triangle of land that separates the factory from two abutting Yale-New Haven Hospital buildings. Project attorney Miguel Almodovar told commissioners Wednesday that the Daggett Developers and YNHH had struck and signed an agreement. YNNH attorney Elliot Kaiman confirmed to commissioners that Almodovar was accurate.

The developers operating as 69 – 76 Daggett Street LLC had obtained site plan approval for the project back in February 2017, and special exception for parking in October 2017. But they never got started building because of ​“unknowable circumstances,” Almodovar told commissioners in January.

The plan to upscale for the former Daggett Street Square artists’ haven, which city officials shut down in 2015 for dangerous code violations a year and a half before a similar operation in Oakland erupted in flames and killed 36 people still calls for a mix of 80 studio, one‑, two- and three-bedroom apartments. The market rate housing is aimed at attracting medical residents and other nearby hospital personnel who want to be close to work.

Almodovar told commissioners in January that the developers had refined their plans for how drivers would enter and exit a proposed parking garage. Under the previous plan that commissioners approved there would have been 55 parking spaces, some of which would be in a basement level of the building and some in the backyard. To leave the site cars would have had to circulate through the garage level and leave from the back and side of the building.

The plan that commissioners approved Wednesday would have cars entering and exiting the garage on Daggett Street instead. There will no longer be parking in the back of the building for tenants, mainly because there’s no longer any need for that much parking. That space would become a courtyard area instead.

Construction is expected to begin January and be completed by March 2020.