Paul Bass Photo
Jonathan Hopkins emerged from cyberspace to take a fresh look at his hometown. At one rebuilt school, he found a perfect fusion of old and new in an alternating pattern of bricks.
At some other spots around town, gravity pulled his thumbs down.
The New Haven of 2010 looks a lot different from the New Haven Hopkins grew up in. It’s even different from the New Haven he left in 2007 to begin attending Roger Williams University, where he majors in architecture.
Like other New Urbanists, Hopkins has a lot to say about the changes.
Readers of raging debates in Independent comments threads may be familiar with Hopkins’ passionate takes on the city he loves. He fires off provocative mini-dissertations on urban planning, development, street life, and race and class, usually under the name “Norton Street.” (He grew up on Norton Parkway and returns there on school vacations.)
New Haven is undergoing its most dramatic physical transformation in a half century. In the midst of a recession, New Haven is spawning new edifices practically by the week, from public schools to Yale buildings to downtown offices and apartments and a new cancer hospital.
The changes have prompted much debate in town. Two longtime civic observers, Anstress Farwell and Frances “Bitsie” Clark, took the Independent on tours of their favorite and least-favorite new buildings. (Read them here and here.)
Before heading back to Rhode Island for second semester of junior year, “Norton Street” Hopkins, sporting a buzz cut and goatee, hooded sweatshirt and baggy black jeans, agreed to serve as the guide for the latest opinionated thumbs-up, thumbs-down tour of the city’s fast-changing landscape. In person, his passion, buttressed by the certainty of the young and inquisitive, burned as intense as in his written comments. Come along and see.
Sheridan School: Thumbs Up
Hopkins started his tour at the Mauro-Sheridan Science, Technology and Communications Interdistrict Magnet School on Fountain Street. (Most people know it simply as “Sheridan.”) The city recently completed a $47.5 million makeover there. It kept the sturdy 1922 main building and demolished and replaced the later addition.
In Hopkins’ view, this was a perfect example of how to make a new design fit into its surroundings, yet add new touches. “You can tell where the new addition was put on,” he noted — but only when you stand close and pay attention. Look closely, and you see an alternating white-and-brick face and new architectural details. If you drive by, you see a brick wing that matches the old wing, same height, and the same height as other nearby two- and three-story homes. “It looks like one school” again.
The school has expanded to K‑8, with 300 students. It needed a bigger new entryway. It’s set back from the sidewalk by a U‑shaped courtyard and framed by a gate with wide-open arches. Hopkins applauded all those decisions. Other apartment complexes nearby have U‑shaped courtyards, too. And the gateway strikes just the right “semi-private” note: It lets you know that people with school business only should walk in. But it doesn’t fence people out; this is, after all, a “public” school.
Hopkins confessed to a bias: He’s known the design’s architect, Ken Boroson, since 4th grade. Boroson visited Hopkins’ class at West Hills School and assigned them to design a house; Hopkins got the architecture bug. Boroson also coached Hopkins’ little league baseball team.
But Hopkins’ fondness for the new Sheridan nevertheless derives from deeply held ideas about architecture. As Hopkins continued on his tour, themes emerged: the new should fit in with the old, sidewalks should yield to “transitional spaces,” scale matters, and people are preferable to cars. That’s why he likes certain new buildings in town — and why others, like the new John C. Daniels School on Congress Avenue, put him in a funk.
Daniels School: Thumbs Down
Hopkins’ verdict on the $44 million pre-K‑8 palace: “an ugly box they stuck a mural on.”
Hopkins was predisposed against the new school since before it was built. His family attends Resurrection Lutheran Church on Davenport, directly behind the mammoth school lot. The church was at the forefront of an ultimately losing battle to save hundreds of homes from the wrecking ball to make way for the school.
The finished product — “the most horrendous thing to happen to New Haven since the” destruction of the Oak Street neighborhood during mid-20th- century urban renewal — renewed Hopkins’ dislike for the project.
For starters, it’s horizontal. It stretches all the way down a long city block of Congress Avenue. “No other [nearby] building is wider than 40 feet,” he noted. They’re all “broken up vertically.”
“The scale of this thing is way out of proportion with the rest of the neighborhood,” he argued.
Then there’s all the “uninviting” metal. The set-back windows. The gate blocking off space for people to sit outside. No grass patches along the sidewalk.
“I don’t understand what’s happening with this roof,” Hopkins said, pointing north along Congress from the school entrance. “It looks like a skateboard flipping up at the end. It likes like it could go flapping away in the wind.” A school, he argued, should give a “sense of permanence,” as at Sheridan.
What about the planters out front? “I don’t know why they’re here,” just randomly plopped down.
Even the colorful mural-clock atop the entrance fails to impress him. It feels slapped on to an imposing, dull building, he said. And its function is confusing: “It’s either a globe or a clock.”
The parking lot across Baldwin Street unnerves Hopkins, too. A block of houses was demolished for the lot. Exposed now are the unattractive backs of houses on the following block, giving people a negative impression of a neighborhood filled with what are — from the front — nicely designed old homes.
He was asked where room should be made for teachers to park.
“Why are the people teaching here driving here?” he responded. “Why aren’t they buying houses in the neighborhood? It takes 20 middle-class people to change a street.”
Q Terrace: Thumbs Up
Hopkins’ mood brightened at the next stop: the new Quinnipiac Terrace public-housing complex along the banks of Fair Haven’s Q River.
The sun helped. It lit a scene out of New Urbanist heaven along Peck Street: colorful two-story wood-frame homes — similar, but distinctive — winding along a grass-bordered sidewalk, past trees and attractive street lamps down to the river. All visible, all inviting.
Like Dixwell’s Monterey Homes, the new Q Terrace is a showpiece of the federal “Hope VI” approach to rebuilding housing projects.
As at Sheridan, Hopkins noted the “semi-private” “transitional” spaces: porches and grass strips between the sidewalk and front doors. Open to people but also clearly marked as an entrance to a private realm.
Then there are the connections to community and the surrounding environment — not just sidewalks to the river to the east, but the pathway to the rebuilt Clinton Avenue School (another Boroson gem) one block west, continuing past playing fields to Clinton Avenue.
Strolling the new streets that tie together the once-forbidding, rundown complex, Hopkins stopped to admire the “grand” community center that greets passersby on Front Street. Now if some retail stores could just replace the open lot on the complex’s southern flank (with the parking moved to the interior), Hopkins said, it would be perfect.
Winchester Avenue Garage: Thumbs Down
Cars are the downfall of the reviving business corridor along Winchester Avenue, in Hopkins’ view.
But even he had to admit the new garage at Winchester and Henry has some quite nice touches.
It has an attractive brick design. It has ground level storefronts with awnings and glass, fronted stone patios and a wide sidewalk. Even the partial concrete facing doesn’t bother him.
“It’s one of the nicest parking garages I’ve ever seen,” Hopkins confessed.
“But you can’t design a nice-looking parking garage. They tried the best they could. But it’s never been done.”
Look one flight up, he said, pointing to the parking decks. “There’s nothing happening up there. There’s no human activity. It’s just metal and concrete. No windows from apartments, with people opening to see what’s on the street. There’s no one on the street.”
The discussion resumed where it left off at Daniels School. Where should people park? Hopkins argued they shouldn’t — they should buy homes or rent nearby. “If people don’t want to live here, they shouldn’t work here. There are plenty of vacant lots to build your dream house on,” he responded.
What if they don’t want to? What if they feel unsafe in the neighborhood?
“There’s a reality of crime in this neighborhood. But that’s because there isn’t a defining middle class. It encourages the middle class not to invest in the neighborhood by building a big parking garage for them,” he argued — and the garage continues the cycle of unsafe, unpopulated streets.
Hopkins took another look at the awnings by the storefronts. “These awnings are a joke,” he concluded. “If they’re going to be this narrow, they have to be lower.” This high up, he predicted, they’ll never keep out rain or wind.
Walgreens Plaza: Thumbs Down
Over on Whalley Avenue, Hopkins asked why he didn’t see more parked cars.
He planted his feet on the asphalt connecting Walgreens and the soon-to-come Sherwin-Williams paint store near the corner of Ella Grasso Boulevard.
He did see some cars. But he said he rarely sees the lot full of cars. It’s one more spot in New Haven designed for parking rather than people, he said — and for more cars than will ever be needed. (He blamed zoning for requiring too many parking spaces per business on Whalley.)
Of course, Hopkins didn’t want to see a parking lot fronting Whalley, period. He had already Googled the hardware chain to get a sense of the largely windowless, plain bland “cinderblock box” coming to the spot. A complement to the Walgreen’s box.
“There’s this bubble created by zoning,” he argued. “It encourages single-use, single-story box stores that have parking lots that are too large, take up too much space” and “sap the life” out of main streets.
That kind of zoning creates a suburban-strip Boston Post Road feel at a busy corner that should welcome urban pedestrians, Hopkins said.
He credited the newer Walgreens for being less “ugly” than the one it replaced. “But it’s still ugly and not done well,” he continued: The entrance faces the parking mid-block instead of the corner of Ellsworth Avenue, where it could greet pedestrians. Exhaust pipes and mechanical boxes don’t belong at busy city corners, he argued. And the parking belongs in the back.
What particularly galled Hopkins was the name for the lot: Walgreens “Plaza.”
“This is really an embarrassment to plazas around the world,” he said. “If we took people from Paris or Italy and told them this is a ‘plaza,’ they would think we’re crazy. Plazas are where people congregate. They feel safe. People are drawn to them. These are asphalt lagoons.”
Fairlawn Manor: Thumbs Up
It took just a push of a walk button to bring Hopkins to a brighter world, catty corner across Boulevard and Whalley.
There beckoned Fairlawn Manor, a cluster of 12 spiffily remade century-plus two- and three-family homes.
Their waist-high picket fences said, “Come stop by and look at the flowers.” Their bay windows and upstairs porches whispered, “Come laze here on a Sunday afternoon.” The eaves extending above the third-story windows called, “There’s something up here to see, too.”
“We can discover new things every time we look at it,” Hopkins marveled. “We can look at the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street and understand everything about it in five seconds.”
This group of homes boxed in by Boulevard, Blake and Boulevard came close to meeting a stereotypically tragic New Haven end. They were almost bulldozed. A New York developer named Mitchell Maidman bought them in the 1980s. He refused to fix them up unless the city gave him permission to build a huge housing tower at what’s now the Walgreens Plaza. When the city refused, he let the houses rot.
A few years ago the new Haven’s leading not-for-profit restoration outfit, Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), rescued the 12 homes, one step ahead of the wrecking ball. NHS did its trademark loving gut-rehabs.
Hopkins admired the well-painted homes’ subtle browns and beiges, the “permanent” and “solid” feel of the renovations, that “defined” “quasi-public realm” between the sidewalk and the front doors.
“If it was up to me,” he said, NHS “would have an infinite budget. Everything they touch turns to gold.”
That’s one reason that even the most critical architectural eye can find plenty to love in the new New Haven.