On the horizon of Middletown, Conn.’s notoriously wide Main Street, the peeling Colonial Revival edifice of the Arriwani Hotel rises like a tomb. Five stories tall and nearly as wide, it dominates the city block between Liberty Street and Grand Street in a mass of granite, brick, and concrete. Upstairs, most of the blinds are drawn, though a few whitewashed walls peek through. At street level, however, the scene shifts, and the floor-to-ceiling lobby windows are filled with inviting light.
In a scene typical of late March in Middletown’s North End, a handful of people linger nearby, drifting between parked cars, sitting on the curb, sometimes smoking or rifling through brown paper bags. Passersby avoid eye contact and walk a little faster. Behind them, yellow “NO LOITERING” signs are pasted inside the lobby windows, facing out. More often than not, a Middletown Police Department vehicle is parked across the street.
The Arriwani Hotel is not a hotel, and it hasn’t been for more than 30 years. In 1994, the top four floors of the building were converted into Liberty Commons, a 40-unit supportive housing complex for adults with a history of homelessness, severe mental illness, and chronic addiction. A year later, in 1995, the refurbished lobby became home to the Buttonwood Tree Performing Arts Center, a nonprofit, volunteer-run community space and music venue. Although stacked together, these two institutions, their patrons, and their visions for the city could not be more different. The Buttonwood’s laudable mission—to “uplift, inspire, educate, and enrich lives through artistic and cultural programming”—struggles under the weight of reality for Middletown’s most vulnerable.
Around 6 p.m., the front door of the Arriwani swings open, and a short white woman named Terri Lachance backs herself outside, dragging a sidewalk sign with “Live Folk Music Tonight: $15” written in colorful chalk. She wears a “Fun-O-Meter” button on her shirt, with a little arrow cranked all the way into the hazardous red zone. There aren’t many spur-of-the-moment concertgoers strolling this side of town, but Lachance adjusts her sign to face the street anyway, as though an audience might materialize through sheer force of will.
Lachance’s newly minted status as program director of the Buttonwood Tree is indicative of the administrative reshuffling that has plagued the place since its founder, Susan Allison, died in 2018. Weekly Buttonwood events––open mic nights, comedy shows, magic acts, and jazz, folk, reggae, and R&B concerts––are facilitated entirely by volunteers. Lachance describes the Buttonwood as a magical “island of misfit toys,” where “every person that comes in brings whatever they can bring.” After the latest executive director, Anne-Marie Cannata McEwen, resigned in 2023, nobody got paid. But, Lachance adds, this uncompensated, ad hoc operation is more representative of Buttonwood’s original collaborative community vision anyhow. Lachance spent three years in the Peace Corps after college, so she knows a little something about giving back.
Despite their physical proximity, Buttonwood Tree patrons and Liberty Commons residents rarely interact with one another. Liberty Commons residents idle on the curb; Buttonwood Tree patrons park their cars, gather their coats, and make a beeline to the warm light inside. The conflict is deceptively simple: The Buttonwood is advertised as an all-inclusive space, but it depends on ticket sales and private donations to survive, and Liberty Commons residents can’t afford to pay ticket prices. Cannata McEwen’s resignation in 2023 came following a series of workplace and personal upheavals, partly because the neighborhood had worn her down.
“It was really difficult to blend the two worlds,” she said. “They’re just people stuck in a different, difficult situation, and you have to have mercy. But it’s intimidating for a lot of people. It made it difficult for us to get audience members. It was just challenging to run a business with them there.”
That’s not to say Cannata McEwen didn’t try. Her tenure as executive director included a series of attempts to bring the people outside and inside the Buttonwood’s giant windows together. She tried to entice people to come work, tried to get Liberty Commons residents to watch the shows, and at one point even tried to organize a livestream upstairs. She ran into roadblocks and resistance at every turn. North End and Liberty Commons volunteers were unreliable, even disruptive, and the Buttonwood regulars didn’t exactly want them around.
“Talk to them? You mean the street people?” one Buttonwood concert attendee said, shifting uncomfortably. Then a pause: “What am I going to do, ask to split a spliff?”
Liberty Commons was the first housing project completed by the Connecticut Supportive Housing Demonstration Program, a 1993 pilot initiative between the state government and a national anti-homelessness intermediary, the Corporation for Supportive Housing, in order to relieve overcrowding in homeless shelters across the state. Since its inception, Liberty Commons has been overseen by St. Vincent de Paul Middletown, a local Catholic nonprofit that simultaneously runs the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen directly next door. Per the Corporation for Supportive Housing model, Liberty Commons operates under a housing-first standard, meaning that access to housing is not contingent on tenants maintaining sobriety, securing employment, complying with treatment plans, or meeting other conditions of “self-sufficiency.” Maryellen Shuckrow, the Executive Director of St. Vincent de Paul Middletown, regularly uses the word “triage” to describe the work that her organization does—supporting the most vulnerable first.
After securing the sidewalk sign on Main Street, Lachance smiles and waves to Larami Vereen, a 49-year-old Black man waiting on the curb. He nods in greeting, then ducks under the door frame to follow her inside. Around here, Vereen is known by his stage name, “El Vee,” a play on his initials. He has deep roots in Middletown; he was a high school basketball star, grew up two blocks from the Arriwani, and his father lives upstairs in Liberty Commons. These days, Vereen has become a regular presence and motivating force at the Buttonwood. His intermediary role is something of an anomaly; he alone moves seamlessly between the worlds inside and outside the Arriwani’s lobby windows.
“If I didn’t have the Buttonwood Tree, I would have been in the streets without anything positive to anchor me from what I was going through at the time,” Vereen said. “This place literally saved my life. Really saved me from madness, from imploding.”
To hear anyone else tell it, Vereen saved the Buttonwood Tree, not the other way around. At the very least, he reopened the connection between the community center and the city block it calls home. With help from the Buttonwood Board of Directors, he launched a weekly “Artist Development Night” to produce recordings for emerging local hip hop artists and offer them advice.
“He has a gift for music, and he does an amazing job,” Lachance said. “Especially when it comes to people from the North End, I think they trust him. He grew up with them. If I went in there and said, ‘I’m gonna start recording rap,’ and I’m like, a white person from the suburbs, there’s no way. It’s not my genre, you know, it’s not my right.”
“Growing up around here, you can do three things,” Vereen’s friend, Yawasaph Robinson explained, counting on his fingers. “You play sports, you make music, or you sell drugs.”
As a teenager, Vereen occupied himself with basketball, marijuana, and hip hop, and over the years, music won out. He regularly attended the annual Wesleyan University Spring Fling concert just up the street. Smoking at the top of Foss Hill, away from the crowd, he fantasized about one day playing on a stage that big. Today, on Bandcamp, a website created to diminish the bureaucratic wall between fans’ support for artists and the artists’ own revenue, Vereen’s many album covers spill down the screen, dating back to the early 2010s. In the last few months, he’s been reaching out to local artists, inviting them onto his records and into the Buttonwood.
As Lachance bustles around, setting up folding chairs, Vereen helps himself to leftovers from the refrigerator behind the front desk. The place is cheerfully cluttered: There are paper snowflakes taped to the windows, piles of CDs on a shelf, and an advertisement for Reiki healing hung on the wall. A few audience members trickle in for the show. Many of them know Lachance and the folk guitarist personally, and the lobby gradually fills with soft voices and the hiss of opening seltzer cans. White heads of hair glow under the Buttonwood’s blue and yellow lights. Nobody mentions the people outside.
“It’s tricky, but I don’t feel that we have a responsibility to them,” Cannata McEwen said, referring to the residents of Liberty Commons and the patrons of St. Vincent de Paul’s soup kitchen. After fifteen years in various roles at the Buttonwood, she wondered aloud if the whole effort wasn’t a losing battle. “I would appreciate it if they would respect the building and the environment better and, frankly, even themselves better. So they wouldn’t just lay around the sidewalk, drunk, or just [sit] there, not even drunk but just sitting there, you know? It’s disrespectful to the business that’s going on, and they just don’t seem to get that. The problem is mental health, really.”
When Vereen was about eight years old, he lived with his family in his aunt’s third-floor apartment on Green Street. Waking up early for school one day, he noticed ten fingers gripping the balcony railing outside. Vereen ran to get his mother, to tell her that his father was hanging from the bannister and foaming at the mouth. As the story goes, someone slipped his father some kind of high-potency drug that addled his brain and sent him crawling over the balcony, but Vereen knows his dad had started using before then, to stay close to Vereen’s mom. It was the only way to live in her world. After that, Vereen says, his father was never the same.
“We’ll start like a regular conversation, and then it’ll turn to a one-sided conversation, and he’s talking about anything in the universe,” Vereen said. “They give him apartments, and he’d rather stay outside. He’d rather be homeless. So last time they gave him an apartment, he didn’t live in it, and they gave it up to somebody else.” This time, it seems to have stuck. Vereen’s father has been staying in Liberty Commons for nearly four years.
By the mid-1990s, Connecticut was preparing to shut down two of its three large psychiatric hospitals. Nationwide, the 1960s and 1970s heralded a significant shift in public funding for state hospitals and inpatient psychiatric care. Civil-rights-era activism gave rise to the deinstitutionalization movement, which advocated for the release of people with severe mental illness from psychiatric hospitals into public life. Hospitals were abusive and inhumane; developments in antipsychotic medication offered a hopeful new horizon; Medicaid could help; and increased investments in community support services would be more effective, more compassionate, and cheaper overall—the obvious solution.
As a result, the 1980s rolled out a laundry list of adult mental health initiatives in Connecticut, including supportive housing programs, case management, vocational intervention, and a statewide network of authorities each assigned to oversee all the psychiatric patients within a certain region. Fairfield Hills Hospital closed in 1995, followed by Norwich Hospital in 1996. The burden of care fell to local municipalities, volunteers, and nonprofits. By 1997, Connecticut only had 550 state inpatient psychiatric beds left. Overflow patients who could not be placed in community programs were transferred to Middletown’s Connecticut Valley Hospital, Connecticut’s last remaining large psychiatric care facility, which rapidly found itself unprepared and overwhelmed.
Even before Connecticut Valley Hospital became ground zero for Connecticut’s mentally ill, the people of Middletown were living in anger and fear. In the summer of 1989, less than five years before Liberty Commons opened its doors, a Connecticut Valley Patient named David Peterson wandered down from the hospital complex to Middletown’s annual Main Street Sidewalk Sale, where nine year-old Jessica Short was enjoying the day with her mother. As the pair emerged onto the crowded street from Woolworth’s General Store, Peterson attacked Jessica with a knife, stabbing her more than thirty times. He was later found not guilty of Jessica’s murder by reason of insanity, but the event looms large in Middletown’s collective memory, tempering community tolerance for the unhoused and mentally ill to this day.
For Maryellen Shuckrow, St. Vincent de Paul’s “triage” work has boiled down to basic survival. “Our goal right now is that nobody freezes,” she said. The Middletown chapter of St. Vincent only employs a full-time staff of 23. In 2024, their food and housing triage programs reached more than 4,000 patrons; that’s more than 170 people per employee. “What’s really important is that nobody dies. We lost 22 people last year from the soup kitchen population, and that’s a lot for us. Keeping people alive, getting them housed, getting them into recovery services—those are our daily thrusts.”
“I agree, feeding people is necessary, but feeding our souls is also necessary, right?” Cannata McEwen said. She knows it sounds harsh, but at the end of the day, her job was to keep the Buttonwood afloat.
“You have to embrace where it is and what it does,” Lachance added. “But there’s a balance between patrons of the Buttonwood that have money, that want to see high-end performances, and people on the streets that scare them in some way.” State psychiatric policy has concentrated and defunded recovery infrastructure, putting open-door community institutions like the Buttonwood in a desperate situation. A volunteer nonprofit, loosely organized by retirees and struggling artists, entirely dependent on donations and ticket sales, is it their job to pick up the pieces?
While Cannata McEwen struggled to merge the two worlds, Vereen moves through them easily. During the Buttonwood’s regular Friday and Saturday night programming, he hovers in between, sometimes standing in the back of the audience, sometimes outside with the residents of Liberty Commons. If you ask locals how they know him, they shake their heads and can’t remember a time when they didn’t.
In the 1990s, Vereen was a local basketball legend. He led the 1994 Middletown High boys basketball team to its most significant state title in city history, and his MVP performance in the championship game forever cemented his name in the Middletown Sports Hall of Fame. With rebounds like that, his classmates said, Vereen was bound to go pro—the NCAA, no, the NBA—Middletown’s own Michael Jordan, destined for greatness.
“I imagine that [my leadership at the Buttonwood] is making a lot of people uncomfortable, but the board seems to be embracing it, like they know that this change is supposed to be happening,” Vereen said. “The town has really never embraced me the way they’re embracing me now. The only time the town embraced me like this was when I was playing ball.”
Vereen never made it to the NBA or to college, for that matter. His MVP game was more than 30 years ago. Instead, when Vereen was 22, he was arrested for having a relationship with a minor. His family couldn’t afford a lawyer, so they relied on public defenders, and he was convicted of statutory rape. He spent two years in prison, followed by a parole violation and 20 years as a registered sex offender. After his release, Vereen worked a series of odd jobs: dishwashing, landscaping, and unloading trucks. He did lot of driving, including non-emergency medical transport to the airport or the bus station. It was hard to make anything stick, as employers almost always conducted background checks. In a turn of painful irony, Vereen’s younger brother won a state title in football, played Division I in college, and had a brief stint in the NFL.
“Everybody I knew turned against me,” Vereen said. “Even if they didn’t believe it, they were like, ‘How could you let this happen to you? You had a future.’”
So why not leave? Move someplace new and start over? For Vereen, there is nowhere else to go. Middletown is his world, always has been, and the cycle of punishment and survival, recovery and relapse, is at least a familiar kind of purgatory. For all his efforts to build something good, Vereen, like Shuckrow, Lachance, and Cannata McEwen, remains buried in triage. To hear Cannata McEwen tell it, there’s something about the Arriwani Hotel itself that doesn’t let people go. “I once had a friend who could see ghosts try to move along the spirits up there,” she said. “He was able to move some along, but this is an old hotel, so there are a lot of people, and I guess a lot of spirits who still get stuck hanging out there.”
In April 2025, Vereen finally made it to Foss Hill. His connection to the Buttonwood set him on stage in the middle of Andrus Field, playing to a mass of Wesleyan University students soaking up the sun. After performing far longer than his allotted time slot, he climbed down off the stage, grinning and covered in sweat—MVP all over again.
But by the following evening, Vereen’s excitement had worn off. Leaning against the brick wall outside the Buttonwood Tree, he looked across Middletown’s Main Street, wide as ever, and shrugged. “So is it the city failing the people,” he asked, “or the people failing the city?”
Sophie Jager can be reached at sophiekjager@gmail.com.
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