How About A Roundabout? Or More Trees?

Urban designer John Anderson came all the way from California to weigh in on New Haven’s evolving Downtown Crossing Project. First he predicted the crumbling of the Air Rights Garage and its 2,600 above-ground parking spaces. Then he offered a solution: Build a series of small garages underground from Church Street to Park.

Anderson’s ideas were part of a weekend-long discuss/design/sketch public workshop that drew new urbanists from near and far this weekend to help the city visualize alternatives to the evolving $140 million plan to fill in part of the Route 34 Connector, throw up a new 10-story building, and rebuild 10 acres of downtown streets. (New urbanism = a movement to make cities denser, more walkable, more connected, with mixes of uses intertwined.)

The group formed not just to critique the city’s plan for Downtown Crossing, but to come up with alternative ideas of its own. Like subterranean garages, a new ​“fork scheme,” and an expanded tree-filled median.

The New Haven Urban Design League organized the event; architect Robert Orr hosted it at the Bourse on Chapel Street. One hundred members of the public pitched ideas to architects, heard lectures, then nudged the designers in open workshop settings Saturday and Sunday.

The city declined to serve as co-organizers of the weekend. But several officials did participate, including Deputy Economic Development Director Mike Piscitelli and the City Plan Department’s point staffer on the project, Donna Hall.

Sunday night 40 gathered to share the results of the weekend ​“charrette,” or sped-up design process. The aim was to come up with plans to visualize more pedestrian and bike friendly and human-scale treatment of the city’s ambitious plan to turn the Route 34 mini-highway into a new network that connects the medical district with downtown and the train station. 

The overall concept of repairing the scar of 1950s urban renewal that is the Route 34 mini-highway to nowhere has drawn general support in the community. The details of the design have not. Critics, including those who gathered this weekend, call the city’s plans excessively car-centric. The city won a $16 million TIGER grant for the first phase of the work of the $140 million project, which includes state and local matches.

The city has convened five discussions to show the public its work and solicit comment ex post facto. This weekend’s effort, billed as a community conversation on envisioning Downtown Crossing, was the first time tables were turned. One of the organizers, Ben Northrup said, ​“We want to share it with the city and we hope it’ll effect decisions in the project. And we hope it might inspire more full-fledged charrettes ideally initiated by the city.”

He was in luck.

His co-organizer, Urban Design League’s Anstress Farwell, said that before the weekend was out, ​“Donna [Hall] asked the design teams to figure out how Orange Street can empty traffic before it gets to Church. We’re very happy to have an assignment!”

Westville Mom’s ​“Fork” Emerges

Architect Ben Northrop and colleagues took on that assignment.They elaborated a ​“fork scheme” concept first mentioned by commenter ​“Westville Mom” in her response to an Independent article covering the most recent of the public discussions on Downtown Crossing. (He had invited her to the workshop; she couldn’t attend.)

Northrup’s elaborated plan places a roundabout on Orange Street where drivers would exit from the highway. This would instantly begin to distribute cars north on Orange to downtown or south on Orange to the train station or straight to the medical district. In Northrup’s scheme Orange and indeed all the streets of Downtown Crossing area, unlike in the city’s current plan, would be two-way.

“That’s absolutely key to creating a pedestrian environment,” he said.

The city’s current map for the exit at Orange shows a whooshing radius up to Orange. A radius turns tend to increase, not decrease car speed, said Northrup.

“A big objective is connecting. We’re asking that the $16 million be used to reconnect streets rather than widen them,” he said

Oh, That Garage!

Describing himself as ​“a recovering developer,” John Anderson, a principal of a Chico, California, firm, said you can’t come up with an alternative ​“unified field theory master plan in two days.” He offered a starting point: envisioning life without the Air Rights Garage.

Above-ground garages in the Northeast tend to crumble when the rebar corrodes, he noted. So, he suggested, why not plan for five underground garages below grade? They could be built incrementally, each having from 550 to 750 parking spots, that in time would add up to over 3,000 spaces.

Such ​“distributed parking” is easier to operate than centralized, one-entrance parking, he said. He suggested the lots be public, providing revenue for the city, as opposed to the current parking plans for 100 College Street proposed building of Carter Winstanley. The city’s plans from a parking perspective are serving the needs of the developers more than the public, Anderson argued. (Mayor John DeStefano recently said the city has been examining whether it makes more fiscal and managerial sense to have private entities own and run parking facilities that serve primarily their own organizations.)

Commonwealth Ave. West

Weekend host Robert Orr came up with what colleagues called an ​“esplanade” plan — a monumental avenue with an expansive median planted with beautiful green trees and lined by buildings that Orr sees as largely residential.

While that plan sacrifices buildable land in the center, Anstress Farwell said, new buildable land for apartments would be achieved in the Orr plan by extending the side blocks into the current Frontage roads.

Orr said that the architects and planners, all of whom volunteered their time this weekend, were not speaking with a single voice. Each addressed only a single aspect of the whole Downtown Crossing project.

What did he hope the forced march of the charrette process would achieve?

“We know people [on the city’s Downtown Crossing team] who want to make a good thing feel their hands are tied. Part of the focus is to untie their hands,” he said.