91 Shelton

The top floors of 91 Shelton are in darkness, a black cloth billowing from its fifth floor open window. Once owned by Winchester Arms, a subsidiary of Olin Corporation, the building was not long ago used for target range practice and the manufacturing of guns and small-caliber ammunition for World War II.

The building’s neighbor, 71 Shelton, was once a United Nuclear Corporation manufacturing plant, taken apart piece by piece in 2020 and carried to the southwest via freight train. Church revival groups now stand atop its bio-remediated soil, its still empty lot, to spread a message of God in the summertime.

Inside the building there is a stalling, buzzing freight elevator. The hallways are long, lined with informally curated art. City Climb Gym is tucked away at one end of the first floor. Most floors seem nearly vacant except for a few sparse businesses; a medical imaging company, a media studio, an artist whose work, I am told, can be viewed at the Met. Pink fiberglass insulation peaks through holes in the walls, some rooms are padlocked, and the smell of fumes grows stronger while ascending. On a New Haven subreddit a user asks, “Practice space?” The answer: “91 Shelton Ave. Bring your own geiger counter.”

For over two decades, 91 Shelton, officially named the New Haven Business Center, has provided musicians and artists with the city’s only studio space rented monthly. After my own band’s rehearsals in our studio, we stand listening in the dark of the parking lot, looking up, wondering who is playing and where they are. Tracing the sound, we attempt to locate which rooms are occupied. The building feels like a liminal space, forever stuck in the intersections of its history, what it is becoming, and what it could become.

Over time we have come to love a space that nearly ejects us; its ever present smell of chemicals and paint, its peeling walls, its open piping. Over time we have swept its floors, carried in and rearranged furniture and carpet, adorned the darkness with light fixtures. We have created music, collectively, within its walls.

There was a time when the future of this space was unknown and that time may come again. Alongside the building’s other tenants, we spent most of January in city planning meetings, unsure as to whether or not the space would remain for artists. We canvassed, organized meetings, and gathered as a collective group. In the city plan meetings, the building’s prospective owners declared, there’s no one in there, as we sat within our studios, listening.

Why do we love this building more than its owner? I’ve asked myself this many times. While the building keeps decaying, we keep trying to love it. Maybe because there is nowhere else to go. Maybe because we deeply believe in what it could be, what it already is, because of us.

During the city planning meetings, arts officials and supporters from across the state turned into a chorus. Artist space over storage space, they said to the proposed business owners, who were from Rochester and ran a string of storage facilities.

I first wrote about 91 Shelton for an article published in Spring of 2023. Musicians told me they learned about the space from Craigslist, others through word of mouth. Regardless of how they found the space, the sentiment remained the same. “It’s the only space we know of in the surrounding area,” they said.

I wrote that many seemed worried about the building’s future and their place within it. “I’m thinking we’ve got a year or two left here,” an artist told me, gesturing towards the newly rising townhouse apartments on Henry Street. These feelings echoed from other tenants, who commented on the area’s recent development boom. They said they wouldn’t be surprised if the building was soon noticed by people who wanted to ‘improve’ it.

This was a year before the threat of purchase came. Their comments hung like predictive specters, encircling us. I’ve been told the building’s owner has tried to sell it many times over, never succeeding, that the time is guaranteed to come again when he finds a willing buyer. They say the only thing the building can become is empty space. Too unsafe for housing, too industrial, too outdated, too costly to refurbish.

While we wait to read the building’s future, we continue to hang lights, to sweep the floors, to bring in furniture and instruments. While we wait, we continue to make; sound, paint, sawdust, chatter. Hands making things, changing, in spite of the rising townhouses, in spite of a circle of specters and speculators.