NewHavenBIZ

n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n B I Z 31 Arts & Culture Continued on next page The Elm City's strongest suit in entertainment/arts may just be music — with a wealth of performance venues for classical, jazz and popular music, including the former Palace Theatre, reborn as the College Street Music Hall. tutions — a kind of entertainment/ arts-centric zeitgeist has emerged. "Once you get momentum, the ability to accelerate that momentum feeds itself," says Joshua Borenstein, managing director of Long Wharf eatre and a resident of the city for nearly 20 years. Thanks, but no thanks How times have changed. Nearly 20 years ago, the city was urging Long Wharf eatre to move from its location at the New Haven Food Terminal on the outskirts of town to relocate downtown. But even a multi-million lure of a state/city incentive package couldn't convince some board members that it was the right move. Fast-forward to 2018, when Long Wharf is dying to get downtown. LWT was part of a consortium, including the Shubert eatre and Albertus Magnus College, that bid to take over a former downtown nightclub at College and Crown streets and convert it to a multi- stage venue. It lost out to a proposal by the College Street Music Hall, which plans to create new musical stages there. e LWT/Shubert/ AMC consortium is now exploring other properties with the city. "Downtown has really trans- formed from the time you could count on things to do at night on one hand," says Borenstein, "to now where it's a mecca for people to come — or live. It's a place you can get dinner and walk around and spontaneously decide what you want to do aerwards because there's so much happening." A Long Wharf market study found only 15 percent of the the- ater's current audience resides in or near downtown New Haven, less than a mile away, which suggests a real growth opportunity, according to Borenstein. "We came to the realization that if we wanted to have a downtown audience, it meant we have to go where the people are," he explains. "And that also meant a younger audience, too, which is good for our future. It also allows us to be part of a vibrant ecosystem that wasn't the case before." What changed? People, for one thing — as in an evident influx of new residents attracted to a livable, walkable, human-scale city. According to Andrew Wolf, the city's director of arts, culture and tourism, these people include "retirees, Millen- nials, next-gen change agents, thought-leaders" who have helped to create not only a critical mass of potential customers but their own new downtown vibrancy "with its diverse, eclectic and public-spir- ited community with ideas on full display," says Wolf. "e new urbanism is a cultural mix." People who need people But you've got to have people first, and downtown New Haven has gone from being a ghost town in the making in the 1990s to a city-center whose vitality is rising along with its residency rate — a figure approaching 97 percent, according to Anne Worcester, chief marketing officer of Market New Haven. "It's one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the region," she notes. A combination of factors has contributed to the slow but steady convergence of activity over the last 25 years, says former Mayor John DeStefano, whose tenure in office coincided with the city's turnaround. "It's like baseball. In this case you're winning games by hitting a lot of singles." In the 1980s and early '90s the memories of turbulent times and period of disinvestment by people, companies and institutions the city suffered through in the '60s and '70s were still fresh, DeStefano says. -New Haven always has bene- fited from the built-in advantages of being a college town as well as its geography, Long Island Sound access, role as a transportation hub and simply by dint of its proximity to New York City. But other factors have helped the city's pivot. e rebuilding, growth and engagement of Yale has been a big deal, too, DeStefano says, abetted by his own (mostly) cooperative relationship with Yale President Richard Levin, whose time in Woodbridge Hall was coin- cident with DeStefano's own years in City Hall. So has the emergence of a new 'Downtown has really transformed from the time you could count things to do at night on one hand.' - Josh Borenstein

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