Melissa Bailey Photo
Doug Hausladen stepped onto a cement block and hoisted himself up on a brick wall — to make a point: The federal government has let a public plaza languish as a private parking lot and cinderblock playground, creating a staircase to crime.
Hausladen, downtown’s alderman, pulled the acrobatic feat last week in the Federal Plaza behind City Hall. He set down his briefcase, stepped onto one large cinderblock, then another, and easily grabbed hold of the adjacent wall up to the nearby roof.
Climbing wasn’t hard, he said. Nor is it hard for the intruders who have been using those steps to access a network of roofs of nearby buildings, damaging A/C units, stealing copper, and spooking nearby apartment-dwellers by peering through skylights.
In response to email queries from Hausladen and the New Haven Independent last week, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the plaza, vowed to rearrange the concrete barriers. The agency does not have plans to stop federal employees from using the plaza as a parking lot, as they have been doing for the past three years, despite an original claim that they had no plans for such a long-term occupation.
Hausladen contacted GSA Thursday amid mounting concern from nearby property owners about rooftop crime.
“As I hope you are aware, there are concrete blocks stacked up in the Federal Plaza that young kids are using to climb up onto the roofs of the properties on lower Chapel Street,” Hausladen wrote in an email to GSA. “The residents and businesses are exhausted by constant intruders on their properties leering through skylights and generally doing damage to the roofs and roof equipment.”
Roof Hoppers
The concrete staircase has aided rooftop thieves, setting back efforts by Pike International to fix up rundown buildings on lower Chapel Street, according to Pike “master planner” Fernando Pastor.
Paul Bass Photo
Pastor (pictured) said Pike is in the midst of rehabbing 841 Chapel St. with a clothing store on the bottom story and two loft apartments above. Pike redid the roof with copper flashing. One week later, he said, thieves crept up on the roof and stole the copper. Without the copper, rain has been leaking inside the building, Pastor said.
“Now we are delayed because of the roof,” he said. “We are losing a month or two of rent.”
Pastor believes the thief went up the cinderblock staircase in the Federal Plaza, just as Hausladen demonstrated, up onto nearby roofs, then jumped onto the property Pike is managing.
The theft took place two weeks ago, Pastor reported.
Nearby property owners say the staircase has facilitated a range of rooftop mischief. Alfredo Garcia (pictured), who owns 831 – 833 Chapel St., said intruders sneaking in from the plaza have been spooking his tenants. Garcia renovated the building in 1999; it has five apartments.
A couple of months ago, Garcia said, one of his tenants looked up at the skylight in her apartment and saw a face peering down. It happened twice, he said. Intruders have stepped on rooftop A/C units, which Garcia had to repair. The intrusions have become a quality of life concern at the apartments, which rent for $1,700 a month.
Rooftop prowlers have become so common that Robert Orr, an architect who owns 839 Chapel, has given them a name: “roof hoppers.” He said he walked into the second floor of his building one day, where he and his wife, Carol, run a co-working facility called The Bourse. He saw a young intruder in the room. The man, in his teens, had snuck into the building somehow.
“I chased him up to the fourth-floor roof,” Orr recalled. He saw the teen run away over rooftops, nimbly jumping from one building to the next.
“This was my introduction to what I came to call the roof-hoppers,” Orr said. “It was a mixture of awe and anger.” Awe because the teens could easily scale short walls without ropes or equipment. Anger because they were intruding in his space. He compared them to ATV drivers out for a joy ride. The teens easily escaped him, he said. “They were taunting me.”
So far Orr has experienced no theft from rooftops, but he called the presence of the intruder inside his building “unnerving.”
Orr said he suspects there are multiple means of getting up on the roofs, but the federal government’s cinderblock staircase has not helped.
Hausladen first alerted GSA of the staircase by email last October. Nothing changed. When he pressed the question last week, he got a quick pledge to fix the problem.
“The concrete barriers were brought in for a construction project,” GSA spokesman Patrick Sclafani said in an emailed statement Thursday. “The barriers weigh in excess of 2000 pounds each and are not easily moved.” But Sclafani said GSA plans to “rearrange the stacked barriers to address the concerns expressed by adjacent property owners.”
“We are committed to being good neighbors and will continue to work with local officials and property owners,” Sclafani said.
Parking Lot Will Stay
In his email to GSA last week, Hausladen asked to discuss not only the concrete playground, but the future of the plaza itself.
The plaza connects five downtown buildings with a variety of public services: City Hall, the federal courthouse, the Robert N. Giaimo Federal Building, the Hall of Records, and the Connecticut Financial Center, which hosts the federal U.S. Attorney’s Office as well as bankruptcy court.
After four decades as an auto-free central space, cars invaded the plaza in June of 2010. At the time, a GSA spokeswoman said the cars would park there temporarily while a nearby federal garage was under repair. Now, nearly three years later, the garage repairs are complete. Some cars have returned to regular parking spots, but many have remained. The cars belong to people who work at the federal courthouse, including U.S. District judges.
On Thursday, 11 cars sat parked on the granite. At the end of a row of cars rose the iconic 44-foot red tubular sculpture by Alexander Liberman. “Liberman intended the public to walk around the sculpture, and experience a sensations similar to what he felt when he visited St. Peters,” according to a government description of the piece. To follow Liberman’s directions, however, one would have to loop around two parked cars.
As the plaza became a parking lot, “cars have bashed into the sculpture,” according to Orr (pictured), who keeps watch over the space from his second-story and fourth-story offices.
Orr called on the GSA to ban the cars and “make the plaza for the public, not just for the privileged” few. He called the lot “the most exclusive parking arrangement around.”
The presence of the cars “has depressed the value of this whole area,” Orr said. If it were opened up again, people on the plaza would create a “safe environment.”
The Orrs would like that: They recently issued an SOS about crime and quality of life concerns on lower Chapel Street after a daylight robbery of a jewelry store.
Orr said several abutting property owners would like to enliven the plaza by using their back doors as main entrances to new cafes. He urged the GSA to “work with abutting landowners to turn it into a bustling urban environment.”
Pastor said Pike shares the vision of turning the plaza into a lively space overlooked by rooftop dining. The company manages three properties that back onto the plaza: 140 Orange, and 817 and 841 Chapel. At 817 Chapel, he said, “we want to have a stair up to a large terrace, with small eating places” serving the estimated three to four thousand people working nearby.
The rear entrance to a former restaurant sits blocked by cinderblock.
“All that could be a beautiful space, with beautiful buildings looking at it,” instead of being a parking lot, Pastor said.
GSA spokesman Sclafani said his agency plans to repair the plaza beginning in May and ending in the fall of 2013.
Sclafani was asked if the agency has any plans to get rid of the cars. He said the GSA will continue to allow cars for three purposes: dropping off and picking up handicapped people visiting the court; easy access for contractor vehicles; and “to support mission-critical operational needs of federal tenants.” He would not define “mission-critical” needs.
Meanwhile, Hausladen has asked for a meeting with GSA and representatives from U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s office, the mayor’s office, the Town Green Special Services District, the police department, and the Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team. GSA was responsive to his request.
Management team member Aaron Goode said his group has met with GSA twice to discuss neighborhood objections about the cars as well as the future of the plaza.
“It’s a public safety issue when you’re using a space that was not designed as a parking lot as a parking lot,” Goode said. He called the mixing pedestrians and cars a recipe for accidents.
Goode said neighbors’ objections are not merely aesthetic: “It’s a question of how we treat our public space — as convenient parking for a few, or public enjoyment by everybody.” He said neighbors were told in 2010 that the parking would be a short-term fix.
“After three years, we think it’s time for that totally inappropriate use of the space to be discontinued.”
City Plan chief Karen Gilvarg said the city shares the vision of bringing more vitality to the plaza.
“From the time it was designed way back in urban renewal, the city’s vision was that it would be an actively used pedestrian plaza,” Gilvarg said. “The city would be interested in doing anything we can do to help with more activity there.”