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94 . Hemmed In and Shut Out
Shops on lower Chapel Street, downtown New Haven.
Development of nearby areas has encouraged the movement of moneyed
shoppers away from the mall. A prominent local development com-
pany, Schiavone, has considerably perked up the upper Chapel Street
area, located two blocks above the mall and directly across from part of
the Yale campus. This newly renovated stretch of shops and restaurants
is now distinctly upscale, housing downtown's priciest venues. Farther
up, the rundown Broadway area was rehabbed in the early 1990s with a
$7.5-million federal grant and a $1.9-million contribution from Yale
(Charles 1994), siphoning off whatever upscale business remains down-
town and relocating it closer to the Yale campus. Lower Chapel, which
once housed a large Kresge's store (Kresge's is the predecessor of K-mart),
is now home to discount stores and jewelry shops. Nearly all those shop-
ping on lower Chapel are black and Hispanic; while shoppers on upper
Chapel and Broadway are racially and ethnically diverse, few are poor or
working class. As one person who had grown up in Dixwell, which bor-
ders the Broadway shopping area, said, "We used to go down there to
look at the people walking funny!" This remark was accompanied by a
