A climbing structure. More live/work spaces. Smaller retail spaces so more local merchants can participate. Access to all the rooftop gardens. Concerts and other events during an expected decade of phased construction. Plus a learning center designed to inspire and stimulate urban kids.
The public asked the designers of downtown’s next big building project to include those ideas. They did.
Call it architecture by committee. In part.
Those ideas won’t change the basic architectural footprint. But they have become a meaningful part of the plan for a $250 – 350 million project under development for the former New Haven Coliseum lot at Orange, George, and State streets and MLK Boulevard.
Montreal-based LiveWorkLearnPlay, the city’s preferred developer, is putting the plan together.
Hill Alderwwoman Colon and LWLP’s Marok
The ideas arose during a friendly, free-flowing discussion Tuesday night that drew 50 officials, architects, Hill neighbors, and other interested citizens to the Bourse gathering space above the English Market on Chapel Street.
The builders hope to construct 524 apartments in five-to-six-story mixed-income buildings with stores all along the landscaped streets; a distinctive hotel rising on the corner of MLK Boulevard and Orange that would run along Orange across Route 34 into the Hill neighborhood; an office tower on State Street; a fitness center; a public square vibrant with community-planned events; and a “laneway” with spots for carefully screened New Haven businesses.
If all goes well, officials expect to submit a development agreement to the Board of Aldermen in the fall, with shovels in the ground in 2014 and a full build-out in phases culminating a decade later, said Max Reim, one of the LWLP principals who addressed a generally very approving audience.
“All goes well” assumes approval from the state Department of Transportation for filling part of the Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere. That will enable Orange Street to cross the former connector at grade and curve gently all the way to the train station. It would also become a welcoming front yard for the proposed luxury new hotel that developers hope will become a destination for travelers now just scooting by on the highway.
Click here for a previous story with more details on the plan as developers rolled out of their idea in the Hill. And click here to read how the New Haven Development Commission received the proposal.
Ideas for adding to the design have emerged at a series of community planning meetings like Tuesday evening’s at the Bourse.
Reim credited Hill South Alderwoman Dolores Colon for illuminating to LWLP the need for day care, yoga and other exercise opportunities in the project. Her latest suggestion: a learning center.
Reim and Travers.
“A lot of what you see here is inspired by Dolores Colon [and others] to make [the development] a livable neighborhood,” Reim said.
Participants in these meetings have found in developer LWLP and architect Herb Newman, who helped build the Ninth Square, receptive to their ideas.
Colon recalled her early days in New Haven, around 1989, when in her walks around town she saw the buildings of the Ninth Square just seem to sprout up without anything like the current level of public dialogue, she said.
That doesn’t mean “this is being built by committee,” emphasized Reim of LWLP. The feedback has not altered the fundamental vision for the site.
Fair Haven Alderman Ernie Santiago, a truck driver, had to be convinced by architect Herb Newman that traffic would not be a disaster.
LWLP hasn’t changed the footprint or the height of buildings or the vision. Yet in conversations formal and informal , public input has resulted in these added touches, altered emphases, and refinements.
“Refining is always the hard part,” he added.
“People were [from the beginning] receptive to the vision,” said LWLP Director of Planning and Development Kiran Marok.
She heard from people about the need for more local stores, for more live/work spaces, for more bike racks, and maybe for a buffered bike lane on Orange Street, she added.
“These people are listening,” said Colon.
Will ConnDOT Listen?
“We’re looking to transform traffic volume projections in New Haven,” said project traffic engineer Joe Balskus, of Tighe & Bond, speaking about the pitch his team will make to the state DOT to fill in the portion of the Route 34 Connector abutting the project area. The state and city are already filling in the western portion of the mini-highway to make way for the 13-story new home for the Alexion pharmaceutical firm at 100 College St. Balskus said his team hopes to convince DOT to lower its estimates of hpw many cars need to drive along that stretch.
“We’re saying higher volumes of people are using other areas and exits. It doesn’t all come in and leave through Route 34. People were skeptical about closing Exit 3 [for 100 College Street]. ‘The world is coming to an end!’ It hasn’t happened,” said New Haven traffic tsar Jim Travers.
“We see a decline in single-occupancy trips downtown,” added Travers.
Other examples of facts he and Balskus are marshaling to make the case to DOT: Gateway Community College’s garage after all these months since opening is still only at 80 percent capacity. And the school’s students have tallied a dramatic 180,000 mass-transit trips.
‘We hope to resolve the [traffic volume discrepancy] issues by the end of the year to support the development agreement,” said Balskus.
That was music to the ears of Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez, who performed the crowd-welcoming honors. “We look forward to getting the development agreement approved,” Perez said.