New Owners Pivot Grove Towards Arts

A team of punk rock game designers has taken ownership of a popular downtown co-working space, with a new game plan.

With community partnerships and a rehabilitated ground floor café-turned-studio, the gamers plan to add an arts and social justice focus to the business’s current core service of renting individual offices and desks to local entrepreneurs.

At the beginning of September, Agora, a new company run by Matt Fantastic, Trish Loter and Alex Cutler, bought The Grove, the co-working space at 760 Chapel St. that provides desks, offices, and community to individuals and small start-ups that might otherwise operate from home workspaces.

Fantastic, Loter and Cutler are also the co-founders and co-owners of Elm City Games, a local game playing and game design company that has been based out of the second floor of The Grove since the old Happiness Lab café at 756 Chapel St. closed at the end of 2016.

Fantastic said that Agora’s vision for the four-story, 14,000 square-foot co-working space that straddles Downtown and the Ninth Square is not just to keep the current slate of professional offerings for local businesspeople looking for rentable work and meeting spaces.

He also wants to bring in more artists, more art, more nonprofits, more movie screenings and creative workshops and community events, to help turn the co-working space into a cultural and social justice hub for the neighborhood.

“We’re all about creating opportunities for people to make cool stuff,” said Fantastic, a 36-year-old punk rock singer and board game designer with two full sleeves of tattoos and a coffee mug that reads, ​“Matt’s Rights Activist.” ​“We’re going for a community center kind of a vibe; a punk house, but for adults.”

Slate Ballard and Ken Janke founded The Grove in 2010 in an office space on Orange Street, and moved the co-working venue over to the old Horowitz Bros. building on Chapel Street in 2013.

Earlier this year, Ballard opened the new music venue The State House just behind The Grove at 310 State St. That’s when Fantastic, Loter, and Cutler saw an opportunity to take ownership and shift the focus of the community-work space that they have called home for the past two years.

“We’re hitting the ground running,” Fantastic said. He said Agora has inherited The Grove’s roughly 175 members, who pay on a monthly basis for a variety of different levels of work space access, from renting single desks or full offices, from being able to access the building 10 days per month or 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“But we’re also refocusing and clearly defining what it is that makes this space special,” Fantastic said. To him, that means everything from painting some of the walls from beige to periwinkle blue; commissioning artists like Hi-Crew and Dooley‑O to create murals on the first and second floors; hosting movie screenings and acting workshops and live model drawing sessions; and building out podcasting and photography studios to allow for local creatives to practice their craft.

Elm City Games, which owns a library of over 1,200 games ranging from chess and dominoes to Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, already hosts a weekly New Haven Game Makers Guild meetup, where designers and players test out experimental board games.

He said that the local entrepreneurial incubator Collab already hosts their workshops and pitch days out of The Grove and now Agora, and that, as of this past weekend, Agora is now a participating stop in Artspace’s annual City-Wide Open Studios (CWOS) celebration of local art and artists.

He said that, while the Grove’s closing time used to be 5:30 p.m., Agora has extended the office hours to be open from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to midnight on Fridays, noon to midnight on Saturdays, and noon to 10 p.m. on Sundays.

Agora is also weeks away from finishing rehabbing and reopening the old Happiness Lab groundfloor café space. But now, Fantastic said, that space will be used as a dance studio, a photography studio, a space for acting and figure drawing workshops, and as the office building’s primary kitchen and street-level community space.

Fantastic initially gravitated towards The Grove and its co-working environment as a natural home for himself and Elm City Games because he grew up in the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) punk music and art scene working and living out of similar shared studio-living spaces.

With Agora, he sees an opportunity to bring the creative energy and community collaboration he remembers thriving on as a 17-year-old pressing records and advocating for veganism and women’s rights through punk music. This time he’ll do that based out of a massive downtown office space rather than out of his mom’s basement.

His band Savage World still sells shirts that read ​“Punch Nazis” in bold white lettering set against a black background. But instead of just selling those from a merch table at Café Nine after a raucous sweaty punk show, they’re now also available in the back meeting room and gallery space at 760 Chapel (at least, they were when this reporter visited for Agora’s CWOS stop on Sunday afternoon).

“We love the energy and activity of the co-working space,” said Mason Rabinowitz, a longtime Grove member who has carried over his membership to Agora along with his digital branding and marketing business colleagues, Giulia Gouge and George Vasilopoulos.

He said that he and his colleagues already take lunch breaks during their regular workdays at 760 Chapel to play games available at Elm City Games, and that he looks forward to seeing the venue tilt even further towards the arts.

Cynthia Beth Rubin, an Agora member who lives in the East Rock neighborhood, was one of the handful of artists showing work for CWOS on the co-working space’s second floor on Sunday afternoon. She stood before two vibrant and chaotic digital prints of microscopic marine life, augmented by hand drawings, photographs, and videos that popped up on an iPad when she pointed its camera at different areas of the pictures.

She said she rents work space at Agora to store the many monitors that she uses to create her computer-based art. But, with Agora’s new pitch to local artists and creatives, she said, the office space may yet prove to be more than just a place to get her work done, but also a place to meet and learn from and be inspired by other local artists as well.

“Achieved My Mission”

Ballard said that he sold The Grove after eight years of owning the co-working space because he realized the downtown business’s original mission to create a collaborative community space for local entrepreneurs, and because he simply couldn’t run the Grove by himself.

“I felt like I had achieved my mission,” he said. ​“I’ve learned that who I am is very much a cultivator. I like to see things happen. I’m not necessarily a sustainer.” The team behind Agora, he said, will hopefully pick up the business that he helped create nearly a decade ago, adapt it to suit their own vision and business model, and keep it financially sustainable.

Ballard and Janke started The Grove in a 1,200 square-foot office space with a grant from Project Storefronts. Within three years, he said, the business had over 100 members and had increased its square footage by an order of magnitude when it moved to 760 Chapel.

Ballard never took a salary at The Grove, and said the business was barely financially sustainable throughout his tenure as owner. A software developer by trade, he worked at Love 146 and SeeClickFix in the years following the Chapel Street move, and took a back seat on day-to-day operations at The Grove, which was largely run by the business’s Director of Culture Christina Kane.

In the past two years, he said, he started spending more and more time at The Grove as he fleshed out the idea and plan for The State House. When he opened that venue at the end of the summer, and Fantastic and Loter approached him about Elm City Games taking on a larger share of The Grove’s current operations, he encouraged them instead to take over the business entirely.

“We inspired a whole co-working movement throughout the state,” Ballard said about The Grove. There were no functioning co-working spaces in Connecticut back in 2010 when The Grove started, he said.

Now, in New Haven alone, there’s the DISTRICT, Agora, the Urban Collective, and Lotta Studio.

“It’s a market that’s a little bit flooded right now,” Ballard said.