With no further news on Colony Hardware’s potential move to River Street onto the former Hess property at Blatchely Avenue, the designers and engineers moved full speed ahead on a briefing of the Development Commission on the next phases of the River Street Municipal Development Plan.
These include park-to-park walkway along the river, including a bridge over a patch of tidal wetlands, new sidewalks, lighting, and major bulkhead re-dos.
The Board of Aldermen will have to be consulted for an amendment to the plan if a popular feature has to be eliminated because of a Colony Hardware move. That feature: the extension of Blatchley through the Hess property culminating in a public resting area at the foot of the river.
Until then, however, Jeanine Bonin (pictured above), an engineer-designer with Milone & MacBroom, the firm in charge of the work, projected that improvements such as new sidewalks, cut outs, lighting, tree plantings along Lloyd, Blatchley, Poplar, and to a lesser extent James, could begin as soon as spring of next year after local permitting is obtained.
They made their presentation at Tuesday’s Development Commission meeting.
Based on public hearings, discussions with local “stakeholders” and the city, they presented a “hybrid of concepts” for the main public feature, which is a 12-foot walkway or greenway running from Criscuolo Park along the river to Quinnipiac River Park.
Chief features include preservation of a patch of tidal wetland — visible here on the bottom left near James Street, over which the greenway/walkway will travel in a kind of bridge. That will bring people, according to Bonin, closer to water experience.
“People from the local schools,” Bonin said, “are excited about the educational opportunities of this, and the signage, which could do a lot of teaching.”
The terminus of James Street (to the left on the map) would feature a fishing area or platform that extends out over the water. “We know lots of people gather in Criscuolo Park,” said Mark Arigoni (not pictured), a landscape architect with the firm, “and we know they like to fish and we want to bring them down to the river as well.”
Another means for that would be a car-top (that is kayak or canoe but not large boat) boat launch at the end of Lloyd Street. Blatchley would end in a kind of “node,” a public space with benches, perhaps of concrete, for gathering and resting. “If the Hess property is developed,” he said, “we’re flexible.”
The twin goals of the River Street Municipal Development Plan are both to attract business to the area, and also to bring the residents of the area, who live primarily above Chapel, down to new amenities along the river.
The 12-foot-wide walkway from river to river might have to make a detour up and around the Seabord Oil Company, which is planning a private marina on their property abutting the river and the bottom of Quinnipiac River Park. “Ideally, however,” said Bonin, “we would be able to have a right of way through there and then under the Ferry Street Bridge into the park. We’ll be prepared for an alternative, however, up and back onto River Street.”
The restoration of the bulkheads (many sections of which are highly deteriorated and not much more than a string of tires) all along the route of the greenway is more elaborate and requires a different level of permitting from the state Department of Environmental Protection. The greenway/walkway construction and the bulkhead restoration, assuming state and federal permitting, would begin in 2009.
The aldermanic member of the commission, Bitsie Clark (seen here with commission chair Peter Wilkinson), was impressed with the attractiveness of the concepts. She wondered whether any residential construction was being contemplated. “Once you have that park area restored and that walkway, people will want to come down.”
Helen Rosenberg, of the city’s economic development office, said that not much of that was included in the concept. “The foundations are bad and the level of environmental clean-up you have to achieve if people are going to live down there is very different, and much more expensive.”
When Clark said not to underestimate the desire of people to live near the water, Rosenberg suggested the most likely possibility is live/work space for artists, perhaps in some of the historic buildings that, it is hoped, might be created by developers drawn to the area.
The “long boulevard” with perhaps a median strip of plantings in the middle that originally was conceived for Blatchley has had to be dropped, said Arigoni. And it will be dropped even if Colony Hardware does not come to Blatchley Avenue.
“If they do,” said the engineers, “part of our job is to remain flexible, to deal with the businesses you draw down here. “We can ‘value engineer’ the Blatchley Avenue work,” he said, “taking some of that money and, for example, restoring the sidewalks farther up on Chapel. The people who live there and above are natural visitors to the River Street area, and this would help to lure them.”
The concepts for the walkway/greenway, cartop boat launch, and so forth do not require aldermanic approval because they are part of the plan approved in 2002. “However,” said Helen Rosenberg, “if the Blatchley extension is not allowed, we’ll come back to the Board of Aldermen.”
She also said that traffic calming measures for River Street would definitely be included as part of the street improvement work.