A funky toy store’s demise is one of a flurry of changes afoot in the city’s Audubon arts district.
Richard Stack (pictured) and his wife Suzanne opened up the Toy Store on Audubon five years ago.
“We were the first on the block,” he said, forerunners in a burst of new retail on the eastern side of the street, where landlords Yale University Properties had just done renovations.
A strip of locally owned shops with distinctive storefronts — offering books, jewelry, and handmade gifts — added to a burgeoning arts scene. The stores fed off arts institutions across the street like the Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven Ballet and Neighborhood Music School. (Click here for a story on Audubon Street itself)
After violin or ballet class, parents would faithfully take their kids by the hand and lead them across the street to the Toy Store, where they’d browse together. Kids could slip a marble onto a zipping Italian racetrack and watch it plunk into a metal bowl. They could dig into a basket of mobile parts, or cozy up with a big gorilla on a red trampoline.
“It’s very sad,” said Stack, to share his news with faithful toy store fans.
The store’s lease with Yale is ending, Stack said Monday, and the Stacks decided not to renew. The couple plans to close the shop in the next six weeks. In total, the Stacks ran their distinctive toy store in New Haven for seven years.
Despite rumors, Stack said he isn’t being pushed out by the landlord. “We don’t have any complaints about Yale,” he said. Yale has treated them in a “straightforward” and honest way, he said. Instead, Stack blamed location and a national recession for a decline in sales.
Faithful customers had a deep love from the store, but that customer base was “not enough to support a store, especially in light of a recession that has cut our sales by 20 percent in the last two years,” Stack explained. “Twenty percent was pretty much what we had to live on, so there was nothing left.”
Stack said the location’s lack of parking made it hard for the specialty store to survive.
Other Changes Afoot
Shana Schneider, director of marketing for Yale University Properties, agreed the location has its flaws: “Frankly, pedestrian traffic is thin on that block, which makes it difficult for some merchants,” she wrote in an email to the Independent, “but we are committed to leasing the space to retail tenants.”
Next to the Toy Store, a second pioneer, the Sogno Boutique of Dreams, appears to be in a state of flux. An email announcing a “Storewide Moving Sale” has been circling New Haven networks. Inside the store Monday, owner Krista Camputaro said there is a storewide sale, but she declined to characterize it as a moving sale. Whether or not the store will stay remains “uncertain.”
“The future is yet to be determined,” Camputaro said. Schneider said only that Sogno’s lease has not yet expired.
Further up the street, The Devil’s Gear bike shop is scheduled to open a small, second shop on Audubon in first week of March – click here for a story on that.
While some have questioned if Yale was making an intentional push to get particular retailers out, Schneider called the changes “natural.”
“As you know, it is natural for there to be turnover in the retail industry and we may see some of that occur in the Audubon District.”
Goodbye Sandra, Hello Moe
One more change-up is revealed on a sign taped to the window of an empty space on Whitney Avenue, at the intersection of Audubon, where Sandra’s soul food restaurant ran for some years a second branch of its once-popular Hill eatery (which has also closed).
Moe’s Southwest Grill will offer Tex-Mex cuisine, reads a letter from Schneider. A patch of fabric from the planned seating is shown on a board leaning against the window. Moe’s is set to open in mid-April.
Sandra's is closed?
Well, that officially means other than the Dunkin' Donuts the last business I would brave the painful and rage-inducing trek out and about downtown for is gone.
I'll miss the food but take comfort in the fact that there is nothing left there that will force me to ignore my intense disdain for New Haven, its subsidize the world "young professionals", its couldn't care less but we're wholly self-righteous transient student population, endless sea of panhandlers, drunks and addicts, the roaming petty bandits moving like a toxic fog from block to block, the inefficient and far too public public transportation, the annoying flyers caught in the breeze from protesters, the Scientologists and Devils Gear all clogging storm drains, blocking my windshield, wrapped around my bike, being handed to me by some obnoxious jerk who doesn't realize he is no different than the telemarketer calling me at dinnertime from India, worrying that one of these same individuals will slap a sticker on my bikes or car leaving a permanent scar akin to rape and on and on and on.
One less reason to put up with all that. Not a bad thing all maybe. Good-bye Sandra's. I'll miss the pork chops for sure.