Top: State Rep. Toni Walker, who helped advocate for the CIF funding with other members of the New Haven delegation. Bottom: A banner of New Haven teen Benjamin Brown, who passed away in March 2019 after a battle with an aggressive brain tumor, that was installed as part of the iMatter project in 2017.
An infusion of state funding has given New Haven officials, educators, and residents renewed hope in a 96-year-old Goffe Street landmark that has fallen into disrepair. Now, city staff are mapping out a three-pronged plan for its use as they complete a planning study, stabilize the building and work towards environmental remediation.
Slowly, that is. And with a lot of money left to raise.
That news came from the corner of Goffe and County Streets on Friday afternoon, as city and state officials and members of the Armory Community Advisory Committee (AC2) gathered outside of the Goffe Street Armory to celebrate a $6.75 million grant that has come through Connecticut’s Community Investment Fund 2030 (CIF). Distributed through the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), the funds will allow city officials to stabilize the building, begin the abatement process, restore the Drill Hall after years of disuse, and bring the massive building up to code with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Friday, attendees also celebrated two smaller investments: a $250,000 Urban Act planning grant that came from the state in 2024, and $400,000 from the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), also awarded in 2024. Both during and after the press conference, speakers declined to give any estimate on the total cost or a timeline; similar Armory rehabs across the country have ranged from $48 million to closer to $150 million, and often necessitated public-private partnerships to get over the finish line.
“Let me tell you, this building is a fixer upper,” said Mayor Justin Elicker, who also called it some of the first good news he'd gotten to deliver all week.
“It made me understand the beauty of this neighborhood, and it made me understand the importance of community centers like this,” said State Rep. Toni Walker, who grew up just blocks from the Armory on Carmel Street, and remembered seeing it when she walked with her father, the late Rev. Dr. Edwin R. Edmonds, to Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ. Decades later, she was proud to be part of the legislative delegation that pushed for state funding.
“The history is here, especially Black history, and what New Haven is representing here,” she said, smiling at the memory of Christmas toy giveaways with now-Alder Honda Smith that brought in hundreds of kids. “New Haven understands that this is a diverse community, this is a community of everybody, and we want to make sure that stays here.”
The plan, currently, is to divide the 155,000 square foot building into three sections, dedicated to affordable housing, vocational and technical (Vo-Tech) education, and a community center that channels the Armory’s long history as a neighborhood hub, arts venue, and event space. The third includes the building’s capacious Drill Hall, which has hosted everything from mayoral inaugurations to City-Wide Open Studios.
The drill hall in 2017. Artspace New Haven File Photo.
These days, the hall sits mostly empty, with jagged holes in the roof through which rain and snowmelt (and bird poop, so much bird poop) reliably fall, creating puddles of sludge on the once-pristine floor.
Before that remediation can happen, however, the city plans to complete a planning study that it has had funding to do since 2024, following a series of community conversations around the building’s history and future. Following completion of the study, environmental remediation must happen before the building, which is currently full of asbestos, lead, and the dust-covered remains of several hundred cellar spiders, is up to code.
The city is still “a ways out” from that step, according to City Spokesperson Lenny Speiller, who added that the study should be done within the next three months.
It marks the latest chapter in the many lives that the building has lived (or as Gov. Ned Lamontt joked, “If a cat has nine lives, how many lives does the Goffe Street Armory have?”). Completed in 1930, the Armory was originally home to the 102nd Regiment of the Connecticut National Guard, which maintained a presence there until 2009. During that time, it lived under state ownership, hosting everything from auto shows to gubernatorial inaugurations (New Haven Mayors Frank Logue, Biagio DiLieto and John C. Daniels also had inaugurations there, in 1978, 1980 and 1994 respectively) to the New England Black Expo.
Dance in the drill hall, once upon a time in 2017. Artspace New Haven File Photo.
When the National Guard left in 2009, the space came under city ownership, and over the next 15 years fell largely into disuse and disrepair. There were hopes of a revival, including in 2012, when the city applied for $2.8 million in state funding for repairs. Then almost exactly eight years ago, AC2 formally came into being, bringing with it a new surge of grassroots advocacy, community input sessions, and a rotating door of bright-eyed Yale students who often got invested in the Armory’s rebirth, then left.
Part of that momentum is a rich (and ongoing) artistic history, including Frank Sinatra’s 1940 performance (memorialized by fellow CIF recipient A Broken Umbrella Theatre last year in their play Family Business), dozens of dances, parties, and concerts, and years of performances during Artspace’s erstwhile City-Wide Open Studios. It was, at the midcentury, where jazz legends like the late Dinky Johnson cut their teeth, and much later where artists and city residents connected over a shared interest in and history of the neighborhood.
Even shuttered, it has channeled that history of innovation, with a new giant “cooling mural” that explodes in bands of bright color on the side of the building and a community garden that has bloomed into an urban oasis in the middle of Whalley/Edgewood. In that sense, a reclamation feels long overdue: in the last four years alone, the space has joined the National Register of Historic Places and the Connecticut Freedom Trail.
Top: Elihu Rubin and Nadine Horton, who have shepherded grassroots efforts to save the Armory. Bottom: A new "cooling mural" that artists finished last year. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Friday, speakers emphasized how excited they are for the Armory’s revival, which—with a lot of TLC and funding that has yet to materialize—will transform a huge and underutilized space into a vibrant hub for affordable housing, education, and arts and culture. While housing remains the most abstract piece of the building’s rehab, multiple speakers said that the vision for education and arts and culture have been shaped by multiple community input sessions that unfolded at James Hillhouse High School in 2023.
“At NHPS, we aren’t just adding internships,” said New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Madeline Negrón, noting that the district’s five career-connected pathways currently include healthcare, manufacturing, education, business, and BioCity. “We are fundamentally redesigning the student experience. We are moving beyond college-ready to ensure our graduates are life-ready and career-ready for a rapidly changing world.”
“The reactivation and renovation of this Armory is the missing piece in our strategy,” she added, with no information on how the project will be funded, or when students can expect to start using the building. “With this project, we are directly investing in our students’ future, and the long-term economic health of New Haven.”
City Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli: It's going to take "a lot" more money to get over the finish line.
When the space is ready to welcome students—which may still be a long ways off—it will host several new “simulation learning spaces”—stations where students can run simulations in healthcare, hospitality, tourism and transportation, distribution and logistics, and architecture and construction. In part, the district has modeled the programming off a still-nascent lab at Hillhouse, where Vo-Tech education is well underway.
Nadine Horton, a founding member of AC2 and the soul of the Armory Community Garden, said she is both thrilled and still a little surprised to finally see an infusion of funding finally come to the space. For eight years now, she’s worked towards this moment with members of the AC2, most of them residents of the Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills neighborhoods. As a resident of the neighborhood, she’s also watched the building fall into disrepair for much longer.
With a dedicated group of neighbors and New Haveners, she also tends to the space’s community garden, where a few raised beds have become a small urban farm with rows of produce, hoop houses, and a bounty including kale and collard greens, summer squash, melon, strawberries, scallion and garlic, logs for mushroom cultivation, and herbs like lemon balm and mullein. While the garden is currently quiet, its weekly community days return in April.
“It is incredibly gratifying to see all of the hard work we've been doing since 2018 to ensure this building stays standing results in the awarding of state funding to rehab this amazing space and open it back up for community use,” Horton said. “I look forward to the day I can walk through the space with my grandchildren."
“This building is an essential New Haven building, and we will return it to public service,” added Elihu Rubin, a professor at the Yale School of Architecture who has championed the Armory for at least a decade, with an increasing amount of neighborhood support (including a block party across the street last year) in the process. “This building is too big to fail. It is going to be an incredible success. It is going to be a legacy project for everyone in this city and for everyone standing up here as well. It’s extremely exciting.”
In a conversation following the press conference, city Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli acknowledged that the city does not yet have a full financial picture of the total price tag on such a project, but knows that it will cost “a lot.” He added that the plan to segment it into three core uses will help the city “identify financial and institutional partners” going forward. Both he and Speiller added that there is currently no timeline for when the CIF-funded stabilization will begin.