Haar: Mixed results from NCAA event for a striving Bridgeport
BRIDGEPORT — It was just before halftime of the UConn basketball game Saturday, when Elaine Dixon stepped out of the historic, mustard-yellow house across Lafayette Street from the arena parking lots, to sweep the front steps.
Someone had parked illegally in front of the house for the sold-out NCAA women’s basketball tournament, and that didn’t bother Dixon a bit. This gathering of 10,000 people could only be good for Connecticut’s largest city.
“When we can come together like this and have fun and we’re not killing each other and fighting, this is good,” said Dixon, retired nursing assistant and immigrant from Jamaica who lives in Harlem, N.Y., but often stays at the Bridgeport house to help her sister, who has owned it for 30 years.
Dixon could feel the positive vibes from her perch at the nearest house, wedged between a highway ramp, the Metro-North tracks and the arena lots, a house built in 1826 by whaling ship financier David Perry, or so a placard says.
Likewise, on a day of unstable weather, a city struggling to find its footing could feel a jolt of energy from the tournament Saturday. As for financial gains, it was a decidedly mixed picture.
Some establishments saw a rush of business; some saw a few more patrons; others, nothing at all as visitors drove home or fanned out to surrounding towns. Bridgeport’s last downtown hotel, a Holiday Inn, closed at the end of January.
The city and local business groups didn’t do much to gin up downtown activity, as my colleague Brian Lockhart established in a story Friday. That led to some “we gotta do better” soul searching. Then again, some business owners said to me, could anything have steered crowds down rainy streets after the game to stores and restaurants?
The deeper issue is not whether a few establishments are seeing a boost from the tournament, which continues Monday, or whether the city feels a charge. Rather, it’s whether Bridgeport can use this and other events to help redefine itself as an entertainment and development destination.
A brew pub taps the energy
Bridgeport Brewing is just a block from the plaza that the Total Mortgage Arena shares with the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater, a former minor league baseball park converted to a concert venue.
“We had the entire Indiana fan club, they rented out a room,” said Jeff Browning Sr., managing partner at the large, airy pizza and beer restaurant.
That was 70 people wearing Indiana red, all of them disappointed that UConn beat their favorite team with a second half surge that reminded Connecticut fans of great Husky teams from the past. The Hoosiers had booked the room tentatively
for Monday’s regional finals game.
“I told them, the businessman in me hopes to see them on Monday but the UConn fan in me wants to see UConn win,” Browning told me.
He figured to see sales up by 20 percent to 30 percent from the tournament, but even in mid-game, the regular Saturday crowd was strong at Brewport, which eschews TV’s, the better for people to enjoy each other’s company. As we spoke, a hefty gaggle of kids filed in with a few adults. “They are a gymnastics team,” Browning said.
Across the room, I see former state Rep. Brandon McGee, now political director of Gov. Ned Lamont’s reelection campaign, eating pizza and salad with other politicos — among them, state Rep. Antonio Felipe, who spoke bluntly.
“This should have been a beacon that brings you to Bridgeport and shows you what we have to offer,” said Felipe, the youngest member of the state House of Representatives at 26, whose district includes downtown and the arenas. “We’re not capitalizing on it the way we should.”
Would you return to Bridgeport?
By the time the UConnIndiana game ends at 3:52 p.m., a group of eight women, fans of Notre Dame from the earlier game, have made their way under Interstate 95 and up Main Street to Ralph ’n’ Rich’s restaurant, where the crowd swelled. Their team had lost. “Go Stanford,” said one, from Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., naming another favorite of the group, which is playing Sunday night in the regional final in Spokane, Wash.
“We’d come back to Bridgeport,” the fan declares.
They won’t be back for an NCAA women’s basketball regional anytime soon, as the tournament has moved from four regional sites to two starting in 2023, with locations named through 2026. At the bar at Ralph ’n’ Rich’s, I ask Indiana fans Randy Blair and Sue Pigat, who drove 12 hours from Fort Wayne, whether they’d return to Bridgeport.
“Sure,” Blair says, giving me the answer he thinks I want to hear. “Why?” Pigat asks. Blair said he stopped in at the Bass Pro store but wanted to get into The Barnum Museum, the quirky, 1893 downtown landmark — which remains closed. “It needs a few more attractions,” he said of Bridgeport. “It’s very corrupt, from what I read.”
By then, the place was packed. Co-owner Rich Ndini tells a patron that he has no reservations left for Monday — a day the he would normally be closed.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
Events at the arena and amphitheater have given Bridgeport “a step in the right direction,” Ndini tells me, adding that the NCAA tournament “is an imagebuilder.”
Fairfield residents and UConn fans Tom and Maria Mezzanotte, at a table by the door, met decades ago at the University of Bridgeport. They don’t agree on the direction of the city. “This has been up and down since the ’70s,” said Tom, an artist with a studio in the city, “but I have to say it feels like something is happening.”
Maria Mezzanotte cites the high taxes, poor infrastructure and what she says is a high crime rate. “I’m not optimistic about Bridgeport,” she declares.
‘I see Baltimore’
We talk about the glory decades of the early to mid-20th century, with giants such as Bridgeport Machine and Remington Arms. “Bridgeport had a definition. It was one of the great industrial cities in America,” Tom Mezzanotte says.
That’s the heart of the question: How Bridgeport can define itself into the mid-21st century. “When I see Bridgeport, I see Baltimore,” said Felipe, the young state Rep., citing that city’s famously well developed waterfront.
On Saturday, as the UConn game ended, the water on people’s minds was a sudden, ill-timed downpour that sent a line of cars through downtown without stopping. The city “is a lot better than it was in my day,” said Frank Nettle, a Massachusetts resident who grew up in Bridgeport, one of the few fans walking.
Up Main Street, toward the now-shuttered Holiday Inn, where apartments are planned, stores such as Sweet Treats bakery remained quiet. Dave Schneider, third-generation owner of Jimmy’s, a 102year-old footwear and clothing store, said he had a good day for sales — all regulars, only two customers in town for the tournament.
Did he expect bigger crowds? “I was hoping and I thought I might because of the sold-out aspect,” he said. “I even stood outside.”
But he wasn’t upset over the lack of aggressive marketing. “It would not have mattered,” he said.
Progress happens slowly. Back at the historic yellow house by the arena parking lots, Elaine Dixon said her sister is thinking of selling. “Anybody buys it is going to make a lot of money,” she mused, “because they’re going to turn it into a restaurant.”