Photo courtesy of O,R&L Commercial

A New Haven retail portfolio has traded hands for $7 million.

The two adjoining storefronts sit at 51-55 and 57-61 Broadway, on one of the city’s main retail blocks adjoining the Yale University campus that’s also home to the popular “Shops at Yale.”

Totaling nearly 31,000 square feet, the two buildings were built in the early 1900s. Tenants include Yale apparel and gifts store Campus Customs, a restaurant, a long-term dry cleaner tenant, the Blue Mercury national cosmetics chain, a salon, a consignment store and four new one-bedroom residential apartments above one of the retail spaces. The complex also includes around 7,300 square feet of recently vacant office/flex space that had been the headquarters for an architectural firm for 30 years.

Yale University was the buyer.

The seller, represented by Frank Hird and Will Braun of Branford’s O,R&L Commercial, was a partnership partly controlled by the family that established the complex’s dry cleaner tenant, Blue Jay Cleaners, in 1937. That family sold the cleaner business in 1982 at the same time as they bought the retail property.