Neighbors Brainstorm Strong School Future

A long-vacant Grand Avenue school building could become a cafe where Fair Haven kids learn about agriculture, cooking, and entrepreneurship. Or a housing complex specifically for teachers, with a child-oriented gathering space in the former elementary school gym — or a ​“makerspace” collective, buzzing with artists at work.

These ideas surfaced on Wednesday evening when about fifteen Fair Haven neighbors gathered over Zoom to imagine new possible uses for the historic Strong School building, a massive 106-year-old brick building in Chatham Square that has sat unused for the last decade. The conversation was led by Interboro Partners, an architecture and urban planning-focused consulting firm contracted by the city to determine a new use for the school building. 

The Grand Avenue building has sat empty after the Strong School moved to Orchard Street. Water has leaked into the classrooms, built-in shelves are beginning to crumble, and the dual gymnasium-auditorium is filled with bright construction materials. The building’s roof needs extensive repairs. A small fire broke out in the building in March 2020, scorching the floors and tin ceilings of the gymnasium, but generally leaving little damage. While parts of the building have begun to decay, neighbors painted bright murals along the facade in 2017, giving the structure some color.

Given that it’s been empty for so long, though, the building has held up relatively well. ​“This school, a hundred years old, is built like a rock,” said consultant Andrew Wald. ​“Structurally, it’s in pretty good shape.”

Previous attempts to redevelop the Strong School building fizzled. In 2010 and 2014, the city turned down every proposal it received for the site, including a community-directed plan led by Chatham Square activist Lee Cruz to create an arts hub and performing arts space in the building.

Most recently in 2016, neighbors blocked plans from a Milford-based developer who had pitched a complex of 32 ​“micro-apartments,” concerned about his transparency and vision of affordable housing.

In the city’s latest effort to breathe new life into the building, Interboro’s role is to determine a new use for the space. The consultants plan to come to a decision this Fall after community outreach. Afterwards, the city will solicit developers for the project once again.

Some of the building’s qualities make it ideal for developers, Wald said. The school has 41,000 square feet, with 18 classrooms. It’s historic and beautiful. It has large windows and high ceilings. The school’s former gymnasium, which doubled as an auditorium, could be repurposed as a communal area.

The building comes with a handful of disadvantages, too. Most significantly, the building is not wheelchair accessible at any of its four entrances, and will need robust renovations in order to become a disability-friendly and A.D.A.-compliant space.

And hallways make up more than a third of the school’s overall space. The halls are 50 percent larger than those at the average contemporary school, according to Wald.

“For a lot of developers trying to rent out the space as much as possible, this is a challenge,” he said.

Fair Haveners and others interested in the building said they want to see arts, culture, and youth programming in the historic school building, according to a bilingual survey that Interboro collected throughout July and early August. The survey garnered 153 responses, 72 percent of which were from Fair Haven residents.

Attendees at the meeting were excited about the notion of a community arts center at the former Strong School building, especially one oriented towards young people.

Fair Haven teenagers are in need of a safe space to gather, said Diane Ecton, who chairs the neighborhood’s community management team. ​“The kids out here don’t go outside,” she said. ​“There should be a safe space that they know, that constantly will be there… They do need some place where they can learn different types of skills.”

Helene Sapadin noted that there’s a community garden across the street from the Strong School building. Maybe kids could learn how to harvest food from across the street and help out in a community cafe, learning entrepreneurial skills in the process, she suggested. Sapadin herself would be a patron, she added: ​“I would love to have a coffee shop on my corner.”

Sarah Miller, an education activist who is running for alder in Ward 14, raised the question of how such a project would be financed. ​“One idea we talked about was to have folks pay rent” for running programs in the space, she said.

The idea of converting the building to housing was the most polarizing among survey respondents, according to Wald: 32 percent of respondents listed housing as one of the neighborhood’s top five needs.

One anonymous respondent suggested: ​“Please don’t let it deteriorate. People need a place to live — why not there?”

Another wrote: ​“Anything but housing.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, a number of attendees spoke in favor of housing at the site. Fair Haven has strong bus service, barber shops, and a supermarket, attendees note, although the site may not have enough parking for incoming residents.

Neighbors disagreed about whom a new housing complex at the site should serve.

Lee Cruz proposed a housing complex specifically for educators, based on projects like Teachers Village developments in Hartford and Newark, where day care and classroom centers coexist alongside affordable housing specifically for teachers.

A similar complex in Fair Haven would be a ​“good place for teachers to collaborate,” Cruz argued. He noted that the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, where he is the community outreach director, has a ​“donor that’s been talking with us and working with us on teacher housing.”

David Hunter of Mary Wade Home, meanwhile, suggested devoting apartments to residents ages 55 and older, given the amenities and communal spaces already built into the school.

Cruz pointed out that the Bella Vista complex in Fair Haven Heights already provides hundreds of elderly housing units nearby, along with other senior-specific housing options in the area. ​“We need some diversity, and I don’t think this building on our main street is a place for elderly housing,” he said.

“We have a lot of that in this neighborhood,” Helene Sapadin agreed.

“There’s a difference between senior housing and over-55” housing, Hunter argued. ​“Someone 55 or older could have their parents living in Mary Wade,” a Fair Haven nursing home, he suggested.

Another possibility floated at the meeting was transforming the former school space into a ​“food destination” to add more retail diversity to the neighborhood. The gymnasium space could host a bazaar for artisan goods, or a farmers’ market.

The consultants also suggested turning the building into a ​“makerspace,” in the fashion of Chapel Street’s Make Haven — a place where independent artists, engineers, carpenters, and other craft-makers could work alongside one another and share ideas and materials.

“People are already making things,” said Jeffrey Moreno, an attendee who spoke favorably of the idea. A makerspace could help small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs scale up their work.

Cruz pointed out that the pandemic might pose a challenge for co-working spaces.

“A makerspace, or anything like that that brings people together, is great idea,” he said, but Covid will likely impact the working landscape for the ​“foreseeable future,” he argued. ​“How easy will it be to get people to give up working in their home to come to a collective space?”

As the meeting buzzed with new ideas for the abandoned school building, residents seemed reluctant to land on just one. A youth center, a food and arts hub, an apartment complex, a co-working space… ​“A lot of these things can be brought together,” Sapadin stressed.