Brian Slattery File Photo
Signs of community life beneath the Front Street I-91 underpass.
It’s official: the city has received $2 million to stitch up the neighborhoods sliced apart by highways.
The U.S. Department of Transportation issued a “Reconnecting Neighborhoods” grant to the city to fund planning for a forthcoming “I‑91 Neighborhood Reconnection Initiative” — an effort to build more human-scale infrastructure around the Urban Renewal movement’s big, fast, car-centric footprint in New Haven over half a century ago.
Specifically, the grant will fund planning around more housing development, pedestrian safety measures, and public gathering spots around I‑91’s exits and underpasses.
The $2 million grant will fund a community engagement and design process to determine how exactly the highway-adjacent spaces should be reimagined. The city plans to focus on numerous highway stretches and exits dividing East Rock, Cedar Hill, Fair Haven, Wooster Square, Long Wharf, and Hill South.
Read more about the proposed focal points of the project here.
East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Smith, a vocal advocate for the grant opportunity whose ward includes a number of highway underpasses, announced the city’s success in obtaining the grant at a Board of Alders meeting on Tuesday night.
A key goal, she said, is “reconnecting our neighborhoods that were divided in the mid-1900s by the highways.”
Smith said that the grant was the result of collaboration with the city’s Economic Development Administration and her aldermanic colleagues Eli Sabin, Anna Festa, and Carmen Rodriguez.
“With this planning grant and the work that’s going on on State Street, we’re doing a huge amount of work to make our city safer — and particularly to open up new spaces for affordable housing, which we desperately need,” said Downtown/East Rock Alder Sabin.
According to Mayor Justin Elicker, “One of the bigger very long term focuses is what would happen if we
reconfigured some of the exit ramps — maybe even close some exit ramps — and opened that space up for development.”
“If you look at Google Maps,” he added, “you can see how much space some of these on-ramps occupy.”