Pulling the wool: Misguided opinions on Broadway

Pulling the Wool
    By Ben McGrath

Last week's news that the Yale Ad ministration was planning to relocate Phil's Hairstyles, Quality Wine, and Broadway Pizza as part of its plan to revitalize the Broadway shopping district stirred little interest among students. The recent closings of the Daily Caffe and Bruegger's Bagels, coupled with the continuing vacancies of other storefronts on Broadway, have made the University's "vision" seem to many like little more than empty rhetoric.

A New Journal article appearing in the Sept. 4, 1998 issue, which claims that Yale has "adopted the reductive view that corporate equals collegiate" and that Yale's development strategy has ignored the interests of students and local residents alike, seems to represent the prevailing student opinion.

Since the Class of '99 first arrived on campus, Broadway has seen the departure of locally-owned stores such as Dakota J's, Benson's Campus Eatery, and Almost Wholesale. The Yale Co-op was replaced by the Barnes & Noble-operated Yale Bookstore, and the only addition that remains is the national cosmetics chain Origins. Unfortunately, much of the blame directed at Yale is unfounded and based on uninformed assumptions and revisionist history.

When the Daily was evicted at the end of August, student outcry was vociferous. Somehow, everyone came to the conclusion that Yale wanted to get rid of the place at all costs and would, according to The New Journal article, "undermine the will of its students" to do so. A guest editorial in The Yale Daily News on Sept. 30, 1998, entitled, "Why chain stores and Broadway don't always get along," suggested that Yale had a problem with "skateboarders with body piercings." Never mind the fact that Yale encouraged the Caffe's owner, Steven Shapiro, in his plans to expand the business by adding a full kitchen and extra seating. "[Yale] even agreed to lend me some of the money," Shapiro admitted to the Herald. ["Daily eviction stirs students, locals to action," 9/4/98, YH].

The fact is, it wasn't until June, when the Daily had failed to pay full rent for 13 straight months, that Yale requested Shapiro vacate the premises. As the activists would have us believe, the $34,000 debt the Daily accumulated was purely a function of Yale's bringing in competition in the form of "corporate coffee giants whose rent payments are always guaranteed," according to The New Journal article.

These so-called coffee giants were Willoughby's, Au Bon Pain, Bruegger's, and the Yale Bookstore. But Au Bon Pain was already lined up to be a tenant in its current corner location before Yale purchased the property in 1994. And Willoughby's--which started in New Haven as a single shop and now has a total of six stores, all in Connecticut--can hardly be called a corporate giant of any sort. Bruegger's was predominantly a bagel joint, and its rent payments did not turn out to be guaranteed after all.

Revisionist history has also been applied in some cases to draw parallels between the Daily Caffe and other departed local businesses. The YDN editorial tried to make the case that such stores as Dakota J's and Benson's were thriving local businesses until Yale forced them out by raising their rents. I can't speak about Benson's because I never set foot in the place, but most of the times when I went to Dakota J's it was pretty empty. This might explain why the restaurant's owner, Jay Luther, didn't complain about being forced out when he shut his doors in September 1996. "If anything, Yale's been overly cooperative in helping me," Luther told the Herald in an interview appearing in an article entitled, "Dakota J's uses its wings and takes off," in the Sept. 13, 1996 issue.

Protestors of Yale's behavior as a landlord often talk about the loss of jobs for area residents and students when locally-owned shops are shut down. Outside the Daily, one person held a sign that read, "Yale, are you going to pay the tuition for your students you've put out of work?" The YDN editorial lamented the loss of jobs at Dakota J's as well. But nobody seemed to mind that the staff of Bruegger's was going to be left unemployed when that restaurant's closing was announced several weeks ago (indeed the author of the YDN editorial seemed to take a certain satisfaction in this announcement). Chain stores may conduct business underneath their national umbrella organization, but their employees are every bit as local as the employees in the mom-and-pop stores next door.

No one seems to care that, with both the Co-op and the Yale Bookstore in place, more jobs exist now than before. And, to the extent that the Co-op can survive in its current location, the co-existence of the two major stores can only make a positive contribution to the New Haven community.

Student complaints are often based on such an automatic negativism that the Administration must feel it's damned whatever it does. For instance, Daily loyalists complained that Shapiro's shop failed because Yale irresponsibly flooded the market with food and coffee shopts. But the very same week, other students complained to a YDN reporter that they didn't see the value of a cosmetics store like Origins. What would they rather see there? "A food or a cafe-oriented type place," according to the Sept. 10, 1998 editorial entitled, "Students ambivalent about new Broadway."

There's no denying that Broadway still has a lot of room for improvement, and Yale must be very careful to protect the interests of its locally-owned businesses. But the story told by critics of the University is narrow-minded, and is even more unrealistic than the optimistic revitalization plan it attempts to undermine.

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