Evan Walker-Wells examines the status of the city’s downtown redevelopment program.

Early Saturday morning, Bambaata Carr was murdered in a club on New Haven’s Crown Street. The 21-year-old man was dancing in Sinergy Bar & Grill, when he and two other patrons were stabbed. The other victims survived.

Sinergy was forcibly closed on Tues., Dec. 1, and its liquor license revoked. The New Haven Register reported on Wed., Dec. 2 that the Sci-Fi Club and Hammer Jacks—the clubs that precede Sinergy at 201 Crown Street—had alcohol licenses registered under Anthony Delmonaco’s name. The Sci-Fi Club had its liquor license suspended twice for selling alcohol to minors and other infractions; Hammer Jacks was closed early this year after three people were stabbed in the club last September, and a subsequent raid led to 24 charges relating to sale of alcohol to minors. Sinergy reopened several months later with an alcohol license in Delmonaco’s mother’s name.

CROWN STREET IS FILLED WITH CLUBS and restaurants that most Yale students probably only know from picking up pizza at Bar or from the occasional college screw. There are over 15 clubs on the stretch of Crown Street between Church and High streets. Unfrequented by most Yale undergraduates, these clubs instead attract a wide range of customers from New Haven and the surrounding area.

Crown Street has always been an entertainment district of sorts, according to Architecture Professor Elihu Rubin, SY ’99. At the beginning of the twentieth century, various movie palaces and the landmark Schubert Theater dominated the cultural life of Crown, Church, and Temple Streets, and there has been some sort of entertainment district there ever since. Crown Street has historically been a “vice district,” according to Rubin. Just over 10 years ago, he said, there was a pornographic movie theater downtown.

Christine Bonanno, SC ’01, and Deputy Administrator in the City of New Haven Office of Economic Development, and Rena Leddy, Executive Director of the Town Green District, certainly do not see Crown Street—or any of downtown New Haven—as a vice district. For them, the downtown entertainment district is not shady at all, but rather a booming and developing area that has come a long way in the last 20 years. As a regional hub, downtown New Haven has more to offer than the nightclubs on Crown Street—despite the attention these places receive in the media. It goes without saying that the Yale Repertory Theatre and Scuzzi attract a very different audience than clubs like Elevate or Hula Hank’s.

Bonanno maintained that Crown Street attracts a geographically and socio-economically diverse clientele. She emphasized that Crown Street, despite its unique position in New Haven—and most of Connecticut—of boasting so many nightlife venues, is not separate from the rest of downtown.

20 years ago, according to Leddy, an upswing in the economy and renewed interest in New Haven led to a downtown revival. But while the nightlife business downtown began to boom, other commercial enterprise, notably retail, did not return to the city so forcefully.

Leddy’s organization is both a result and a catalyst of New Haven’s economic revival. The Town Green District is a business improvement commission, a quasi-governmental agency funded by surtax on businesses in its area. This money is used to pay for services that benefit participating businesses, like the clean-up crews hired to ensure that the New Haven Green and downtown are clean and free of graffiti. One of the Town Green’s most influential projects, according to Bonanno, was a renovation of the facades of buildings downtown, a simple investment in infrastructure that made the whole area more business-friendly.

Leddy suggested that the recent development downtown is more the result of an organic process than any action on the part of the New Haven government or the Town Green District. Downtown was revitalized, she said, “as part of an organic process.”

“Some bar or nightclub opened, was successful, and someone else wanted to be near it,” she said.

Bonanno, who grew up in New Haven and attended Yale, said that not only has downtown changed drastically in the last decades, but its relationship with the University has changed as well. In the time since she was an undergraduate, she said, “the risk has shrunk” each year for entrepreneurs interested in opening businesses downtown and for their customers. This expansion has helped to bridge the town-gown divide.

THE NEW ENTERTAINMENT MODEL that is driving downtown New Haven’s economy may finally do what decades of urban renewal failed to accomplish. After World War II, New Haven tried to redesign itself to motivate more people to move to the city. Rubin said that though the rubric of the day was “a more middle-class New Haven,” that meant middle-class whites.

The city developed a plan that featured buildings either designed by Yale architect Paul Rudolph, or in his style, to reinvent downtown New Haven. These Brutalist buildings replaced many of the densely-packed, low-rise buildings that make city living unique, said Rubin, and they tore apart the social fabric that tied the New Haven community together.

Furthermore, the entire plan had a major conceptual fault. The leaders of New Haven’s urban renewal tried to bring middle-class whites into the city by trying to make the city more like the suburbs. With more car-friendly streets and a huge mall, as well as large parking garages, New Haven was supposed to offer all the amenities of the suburbs in a city.

This failed, Rubin said, because it simply made New Haven no different from its surrounding suburbs: There was no convincing reason to move into the city, only reasons to move out (more space, cleaner air, and so on.) The urban renewal project harmed the city by destroying its communities and taking away the unique character of the city.

Now that New Haven offers something that the suburbs and smaller towns cannot, however, it has experienced a small downtown renaissance. Downtown New Haven, said Bonanno, now has a higher residential density than Denver. Residents are by no means just Yale-affiliated, and Leddy said that she doesn’t think that downtown has gentrified, like economically expanding neighborhoods often do. “Housing is still affordable,” she said, “We’re not pushing anyone out.”

The new housing development on the corner of Chapel and State Streets is meant to capitalize on this new appeal. According to Bonanno, one caveat that New Haven had when negotiating with developers was that the new apartment complex had to include a supermarket—something that the area lacks entirely. This way, she said, not only would there be more housing downtown, but developers would be forced to contribute to the general welfare of the neighborhood.

Leddy said this lack of commercial infrastructure is part of the problem that downtown faces right now: Streets like Crown Street are “mostly nighttime streets right now.” She hopes that the economic improvement of the district can help spur more daytime businesses, to give the neighborhood life during the day.

NEW HAVEN’S CURRENT MOTTO—“It All Happens Here”—may be all too right. Rubin suggested that typical urban violence, like the stabbings at Sinergy, may be an inevitable side effect of New Haven’s economic development. Bonanno and Leddy insisted that Sinergy is just one bad apple and should not reflect poorly on the rest of the businesses on Crown Street or Downtown. Rubin, however, said that though much of downtown is the sort of “low-brow entertainment center that every city wants,” all in all, it gets people into New Haven and stops the city from becoming “hermetic, homogenous, and predictable.” The worst thing, he suggested, would be if several crimes—or a few bad apples—halted the development. But for it all to happen here in New Haven—from a thriving downtown to maintaining strong residential communities—it will all, both crime and economic development, have to happen here.