East Hartford tells final Silver Lane Plaza tenants that they’ll have to leave

East Hartford this month gave the last small shops and service businesses at Silver Lane Plaza notice to move out, but several of them say they have nowhere else to go.

The town acquired the long-dilapidated plaza by eminent domain in March, and now wants to demolish all three buildings and then offer the site to private developers.

But a handful of little businesses remain, and say they can’t afford to relocate or can’t find a new spot.

“All of us were just served eviction notices giving us 60 days. That’s Aug. 7, it’s not enough time,” said Herman Todd, owner of the Living Word Imprints embroidery and print shop at the plaza. “We don’t have anywhere to go. We’re coming up on the busy part of our season, we don’t have time to look for a place.”

To accommodate the remaining tenants, East Hartford has pushed back its schedule for tearing down the east and west buildings. Even so, it says there’s no way they can continue operating there in the long term.

“It would take $5 million to bring the buildings up to code. If we renovate that parking lot, it’s $3.8 million. And a lot of the tenants have been paying 50 cents to $1 a square foot for rent,” Mayor Michael Walsh said previously. “Now that we have the buildings, we have a better understanding of why no money was invested in the plaza — there was no money.”

Using state development funds, the town is offering up to $10,000 per business for moving expenses that they can document. It is also offering up to $25,000 for equipment that can’t be moved.

The town has said it will help the small businesses find new locations, but not at the vastly below-market-rate rents that they’d become accustomed to at the plaza.

Todd said Thursday that some of the plaza’s remaining tenants put money into improving their storefronts when they were owned by Leon Chen’s East Hartford Venture LLC. That money is lost if they must relocate, he said.

“They expect all of us to just move. I know some people have put thousands of dollars into the property, one put in over $100,000,” he said. “The city isn’t making a reasonable offer. The city says it’s not responsible for security deposits, that we have to go after the old owners. But my security deposit was over $5,000, one guy’s was over $14,000.”

Todd said tenants are talking with each other about how to proceed. A relative of the owners of the New York Hair Salon said his family is negotiating with the town and trying to decide how to proceed.

The final two businesses in the large, north building plan to move in July.

“When we purchased the business, we knew this was coming,” Bare Bones Boxing’s owner Brady Lee said recently. “It’s been in discussions for a very long time, so it wasn’t a surprise.”

Many shops and small offices shut down before last year, sometimes leaving behind debris and broken furniture. The plaza had been in decline for decades, and town officials have complained that the deeply rutted parking lot and vacant, derelict storefronts were a major turn-off for developers considering new residential or commercial projects in the Silver Lane corridor.

With Bare Bones and the Je Mart on the way out in July, the town has hired the Fuss and O’Neill engineering firm to identify asbestos and other hazardous materials there so demolition can be done in September.

For the east and west buildings, the timetable is a bit looser.

“The town is meeting individually with each tenant to identify relocation sites and compile financial records for possible relocation assistance,” according to a town report on Thursday. “The goal is to empty both buildings by Sept. 30, but no later than Dec. 31.”

Afterward, the town will seek a contractor to tear down both buildings. But even before that, East Hartford plans to invite developers around Labor Day to submit proposals for what they’d do with the site after it has been cleared. Walsh would like to choose a developer and reach a deal to transfer the property by late spring of 2024.

“The town does not want to be in the real estate business, emphatically not,” he said. “The reason we own it is because what was there was unacceptable, and nobody was coming forward to do anything. Government inserted itself because the private sector failed.”