When Frances “Bitsie” Clark surveys New Haven’s transformed landscape, one new school makes her think of skin disease. Another makes her break out in song.
Clark, who represents downtown on the Board of Aldermen and ran the arts council for 19 years, is enthusiastic overall about the bustle in New Haven these days. She agreed to lead a tour of her favorite three new or renovated buildings in town — as well as her three least favorite.
She had plenty to choose from. In the midst of a recession, New Haven is spawning new facades practically by the week, from public schools to Yale buildings to downtown offices and apartments and medical centers. (Click here to follow a similar tour preservationist Anstress Farwell offered two weeks ago; feel free to offer your own thoughts in the comments section below or suggest other tour leaders.)
Thumbs Up: Co-op
Clark started her tour on Crown Street, where the indefatigable 77-year-old alderwoman oohed and ahhed at at the new Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School as though beholding it for the first time (pictured at the top of the story). As a lifetime arts promoter, she thrills to the state-of-the-art rehearsal and performance spaces inside, which are meant not just for the magnet school’s students but for the community too.
She also marveled at architect Cesar Pelli’s design, from the orange-tinged brick to the studio glass that lets you see right into dance rehearsals above the entrance.
What excited Clark most about the new school could be found inside: a 350-seat theater. It reminded her of a similar theater Pelli designed at her alma mater, Vassar. She compared Co-op’s hall, with its balconies and proscenium arch-framed stage and flyspace, to “little jewel-like opera houses in Europe.”
The stage makes you want to break out in song, Clark said. Then she obliged, with a bar from “Hello, Dolly.” (Join her onstage in the video at the top of the story.)
1 Thumb Down (Another Up): Smilow
Clark couldn’t bring herself to place thumbs completely down on any one project. Asking her to trash a New Haven endeavor is like asking Willie Mays to strike out or catch fly balls with his glove turned upward instead of basket-style; it’s not in her nature. A good sport, Clark agreed to include three pans along with three praises in her tour. But she added “provisional” to her thumbs-down selections — or, in the case of the Smilow Cancer Hospital rising on Park Street, a philosophical thumbs up along with the architectural thumbs down.
“Great things are going to happen in this cancer center. It’s wonderful that we have it here. Its wonderful for our population. It’s wonderful for the world. We’re going to become world famous in New Haven because of Smilow,” Clark began as she narrated her way up South Frontage Road.
A “but” was coming.
“It ought to be a place that looks uplifting,” she continued. “But look at these colors!”
“It doesn’t have any style or class architecturally. Maybe it’s not supposed to … But you want it to be something that when you look at it you say, ‘Oh gosh. This is beautiful! It makes me feel good to look at it.’ Look at it! It’s very prosaic. It’s gray and brown. It isn’t uplifting…”
(Click here for a different take on Smilow.)
Clark enjoys the Rubik’s Cube-like related building next door, the six-story new clinical lab building at 55 Park St. It has color, fun, imagination, she said.
Meanwhile, she said, pointing back to Smilow, the cancer hospital has … bars.
“What are they? It could be a prison. Look at the bars on the windows! It’s overbearing.”
Clark regained her more diplomatic, upbeat bearings. “Great things are going to happen in this building. Great things,” she said. “Too bad it isn’t magnificently beautiful on the inside.”
Thumbs Up: The Study At Yale
Clark was bubbling again as she walked up to Chapel Street, where she met up with her favorite pair of glasses.
They’re big glasses. Metal glasses. Frames, actually, with no glass.
They’re a sculpture at the entrance to The Study at Yale, the swanky reincarnation of the old Colony Inn.
While the whole “study” shtick is a bit “hokey” or “silly-billy,” Clark said, the renovators obviously had a great time recreating the hotel, and did it with “class” and playfulness.
Clark beheld the glasses and and pretended to be a visitor to The Study. “Well, I finished studying for the night, I’ll put my glasses down” and head for a drink in the hotel restaurant, she riffed. Then she exclaimed about the glass-fronted sunny sitting room extending over the sidewalk; through the window people could be seen picking books from the shelves and lounging on leather chairs.
She even loves the doormen’s polo shirts, Clark said.
Just then, as if on cue, one of those doormen called to her. He invited her inside for a visit — and a complimentary glass of champagne.
Inside, six bubbly-filled cocktail glasses awaited. But Clark was distracted by the calm vibe inside the sitting room. “This,” she said, “is high-class Starbucks-type stuff.”
Down the hall she walked to “The Heirloom,” the understated hotel restaurant also overlooking Chapel. Clark pointed out the small track lights. The tasteful black-and-beige decor. The wine rack. “It’s not full of chotchkes,” she noted. She pronounced it all very “New York.” It was a compliment.
Thumbs Sideways: Metropolitan Business Academy
Clark had trouble mustering any kind of compliment for the $41 million, 78,000 square-foot school nearing completion on Water Street.
She steered her 1999 Saab there because it ranks as one of the three bottom choices on her “least favorite” list.
Instead of pointing her thumb down, she turned it sideways. Just in case. She called it a “provisional thumbs down.”
“I’d like to reserve my judgment; maybe it will be grand” when all the exterior is placed on the building before its scheduled January opening, Clark said.
The oddly put-together shapes of the design already sit wrong with her. So does the “pockmarked look.”
She glanced at a portion (lower left in the photo) that does have its final skin.
“Look at this,” she said. “It looks like it has the measles!” That was not a compliment.
A&A: Up. New Colleges: Down
Clark included two new Yale building projects on her list. One she adores for restoring the past. The other she dislikes for trying to imitate the past rather than break new ground.
The Art & Architecture building at Chapel and York broke new ground when Paul Rudolph designed it in the early 1960s. Critics found the asymmetrical, concrete tower cold and unpleasant. Clark toured it at its birth — and loved it for its boldness and creativity, the details built into the exterior, such as the lines etched into the concrete and the “measuring stick” on the Chapel side. Clark lamented when the “constant gripes” led to modifications of the design.
Now the place has been scrubbed, restored — and, in addition to a new wing on the grave of the old Gentree’s building on York, returned to its original design, Clark said.
Architect Robert Stern sought to return to Yale roots when he designed two new residential colleges across from Ingalls Rink, on Prospect Street, Sachem, Mansfield, and Prospect Place. In this case, Clark begged to differ with the strategy.
She agreed with Yale’s choice of where to build. Unlike some preservationists and environmentalists in town, she doesn’t mind that Yale will tear down a slew of buildings (like those pictured) to make way for the two new colleges. “None of this stuff looks that great to me. I don’t feel nostalgic about it,” she said of the Seeley Mudd library, the School of Management classrooms, and other edifices targeted for demolition.
But she felt “disappointed,” “let down,” this spring when Yale displayed a model of Stern’s design (pictured; click here for more views). She saw an attempt to replicate the looks of trademark Yale residential colleges that were themselves modeled on Oxford and Cambridge, rather than taking a daring stab at bringing new ideas to the landscape within the tradition.
“These are colleges that are trying to look like Yale,” she said. “It’s going to look like it’s trying to look like the other buildings.”
She contrasted that approach to the modernist Morse and Stiles colleges designed by Eero Saarinen. They’re controversial; critics find them cold, poorly designed, out of place in the neoGothic Yale forest. Clark called them ingenious additions that fit right into the landscape. (Saarinen also designed the “Yale Whale,” Ingalls Rink, across the street from the new planned colleges.) She spoke of how Saarinen designed Morse and Stiles so that vistas lead to defining towers in four directions: Payne-Whitney Gym, Christ Church, Harkness, and the Hall of Graduate Studies. The buildings themselves, she said, convey a “Norse/Viking look … I love them. They’re like great Viking mead halls.”
Clark said she wasn’t even “asking” for “something grand” from the designs for the new colleges. “I’m just asking for something with imagination.” Prospect Hill aside, she’s find plenty of it elsewhere in the new New Haven.
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