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The art of the business district
May/June 2009
by Kathrin Day Lassila '81
Painters
think in colors, architects think in spaces. Bruce D. Alexander '65 thinks in
storefronts. "Here I want to have a sports-themed restaurant, upscale -- burgers,
late-night food," he said, waving at a stretch of Elm Street during a tour of
the Broadway retail district. "And for that corner" -- gesturing at Au Bon Pain,
the most prominent building in the area -- "I'd love to see high-quality
housewares. Or apparel. We'd take it up two stories -- glass fronted. It would be
the key entry to the district." Au Bon Pain would move to another space.
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Yale owns about two-thirds of the properties in the Broadway district.
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Alexander
is the university's impresario of all things real estate (officially, Yale's
vice president for New Haven and state affairs and campus development).
Arguably, he has had more hands-on influence on the downtown streetscape than
anyone else in the city. It's because of Alexander that today on Yale's stretch
of Chapel, across from Old Campus, you can buy Skagen watches and artichoke tapenade
but you can't get a Subway sandwich or a tattoo.
In
his 26 years at the real estate development firm Rouse, Alexander shaped such
tourist magnets as New York City's South Street Seaport and Boston's Faneuil
Hall Market Place. In the early '90s, he joined a group advising then-Yale president
Benno Schmidt '63, '66LLB, on New Haven development. In that era, New Haven was
infamous as an urban failure: in a 1993 article, the New York Times called it "a city of
disappointments and diminished hopes."
He
remembers walking down York Street to a meeting of the group. "It was dirty,
and Toad's had beer cans out on the sidewalk. I got to the meeting and said,
'We've got a world-class university and we're surrounded by a second-rate
retail district. We have to start buying the retail properties.'" They did.
Then, in 1997, Schmidt's successor, Richard C. Levin '74PhD, brought Alexander
on staff. Today Yale owns about two-thirds of the properties in the Broadway
district. The majority of the shops are no longer barbershops and dry cleaners
and boarded-up vacancies, but the likes of J. Crew and the Paul Richards shoe
store and Ashley's ice cream.
Alexander
is a tough landlord. Tenants in the Broadway district's main area have to stay
open until at least 9 p.m. (except Sundays), to attract evening shoppers and
make the streets safer. Safety is an unimpeachable goal in New Haven; but the
hours can be hard on a small staff, and some merchants resent the restrictions written
into their leases. Shops must stay open during business hours on all business
days -- no European-style breaks during August.
Alexander
is also a perfectionist about the look of the streets. He never boards up an
empty property, but has its windows whitewashed and filled with outsized
posters, or lets other stores display their merchandise there. Yale and tenants
contribute toward street cleaning and sidewalk flower planters. And all the
picturesque signs hanging from storefronts on Chapel Street are subject to
lease restrictions -- no plastic, no backlighting -- as well as to Yale's review and
possible amendment.
Occasionally,
Yale draws fire for micromanaging. In 2005, the New York Times said the Broadway district "looks
like something Disney might have conjured up for a college town."
How
do you feel about that? I asked Alexander.
He
laughed. "In view of what would have been said about Broadway ten years ago,"
he said, "I'll take it." 
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