Duncan Reborn As ​“Graduate New Haven”

The Hotel Duncan is open again on Chapel Street — no longer as a 92-room single-room occupancy (SRO), but instead as a renamed upscale, college-themed 72-room boutique establishment preserving some of its historic original designs and fixtures.

At a jubilant press conference and ribbon-cutting at 1151 Chapel St. Thursday morning, Mayor Toni Harp, city Acting Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli, and representatives from the Chicago-based investment and development firm AJ Capital Partners joined roughly 100 Downtown and Dwight neighbors and local economic development boosters for the grand opening of what’s now called the Graduate New Haven.

The ribbon-cutting for the hotel, which officially opened for business on Oct. 3, represented the culmination of over two years of development since former owner Stirling Shapiro sold the 1894-built SRO to AJ Capital Partners for $8 million in the summer of 2017.

The intervening years have seen this development at the center of a number of local political disputes regarding the loss of affordable housing downtown and the new hotel’s openness to a union organized staff (click here, here, here, here, here , and here for background). Thursday’s ribbon cutting held almost none of that accumulated angst.

Instead, everyone in attendance marveled at the history the new owners have preserved — including the original lobby’s checkered-tile floors, pressed-tin ceiling, wood-paneled walls, and century-old elevator. They marveled as well at the stylish additions — new bulldog-patterned carpets,a ground-floor cafe and private event space, and bedrooms that rent for between $169 to $699 per night.

Roughly 40 people work at the new six-story hotel, and, according to a Graduate New Haven representative, those employees are not union organized.

“With the addition of this gleaming, new, boutique hotel,” Harp (pictured) said in opening remarks that used the word ​“gleaming” three times in two minutes, ​“we underscore the fact that New Haven is a destination for people, and a place they want to be and stay.”

The Graduate New Haven is the second hotel to open downtown this year, following Randy Salvatore’s The Blake on High Street. Meanwhile, Spinnaker Real Estate has plans to build a new 132-room Hilton Garden Inn at the former Webster Bank building on Elm Street and, around the corner on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, Choice Hotels International plans to build a 130-room Cambria hotel.

“We are the front door to what is happening in this economy,” Piscitelli (pictured) added about the surge in biotech businesses and neuroscience research in town and the accompanying restaurants, hotels, and residential developments that all contribute to a thriving economy.

“These are signs that we are going to be with AJ Capital and all of our hotel partners to make sure that we have strong demand for the rooms here over a long period of time.”

On a pre-press conference tour of the hotel’s lobby, cafe, bedrooms, and subterranean Old Heidelberg bar, hotel Manager Dominic Ruggieri (pictured) said that the hotel design and amenities aren’t just meant to reference Yale and New Haven history. The hotel itself should be a meeting and hang-out place for local residents and hotel guests alike, he said.

“We want to engage with the community,” he said as he walked from the sports-themed ​“Theo Epstein Scouting Room,” filled with books, photographs, posters, and pennants from Yale sports history …

… to the ​“Stirling Library,” located in Shapiro’s former ground-floor office and boasting a a painting by former Hotel Duncan resident named Robert Klopp and a table that once belonged to Shapiro’s grandmother …

… to the Poindexter cafe (pictured above, with Dwight’s Linda Townsend-Maier and Marshall Wells) and capacious backroom private event space that used to house Hotel Duncan guest rooms …

… to the Old Heidelberg bar in the basement, formerly home to original, eponymous restaurant and drinking hole.

All of these ground-floor rooms are open to the public and are meant to encourage social encounters between locals and guests as well as celebrate downtown and Yale history, Ruggieri said.

The rooms, meanwhile, range from double-beds to queen‑, king‑, and premium king-sized rooms, with painted silhouettes of famous Yale alumni forming a ring around the tops of each room’s walls.

Ruggieri described the target guest for the new hotel as ​“higher-end” and ​“adventurous.”

“I think they did a really, really nice job,” said Shapiro (pictured), who ran the Hotel Duncan for 47 years after inheriting the business from his father, who had bought the building in the 1950s. ​“I’m still amazed every time I walk in” to see both what has been preserved and what is brand new.

He described the sensation as ​“bittersweet,” to see a property that had been in his family’s possession for so many decades transformed into a new boutique hotel. He praised AJ Capital Partners and Graduate Hotels for preserving as much of the Duncan’s history as they did, in a way that other mainstream hotel chains that had been interested in the property almost certainly would not have.

“We saw through the good and the bad times,” he reflected about the old Hotel Duncan. ​“But we did well, we were a well-run outfit, and, on busy weekends we were always sold out.”