Thomas Breen photo
Can you identify where the above pile of dirt is located?
Hint: It’s in the middle of a city where the landscape is transforming before our eyes amidst a years-long building boom. That means lots of big piles of dirt, for now.
The pictured pile currently stands at 87 Union St., on a 2.72-acre surface lot that used to house the Torrco plumbing supply company.
The New York City-based developers Epimoni and Adam America demolished that building in April and plan to replace it with 299 market-rate apartments and 6,100 square-feet of retail space, all scheduled to open sometime in 2021.
In the meantime, in this transition period between past commercial and industrial use, demolition, and future apartments and retail, the cleared lot remains a construction zone.
On Wednesday afternoon, that construction zone was overlooked by a new, towering pile of dirt (pictured), in-fill soil just waiting for a foundation to be dug.
“The material is structural fill excavated from site and will be there temporarily,” Adam America Project Manager Peter Antoniou told the Independent by email on Friday. “Once we pour our foundations it will be used to backfill the site.”
On a single afternoon in New Haven, a few such piles of dirt and debris associated with a variety of ongoing construction projects were plenty visible to a reporter with bicycle wheels and a camera and an hour to kill.
Here are a few photo updates on what New Haven looks like, from one perspective, amidst the current construction frenzy.
On the super-block bounded by Orange Street, Audubon Street, State Street, and Grove Street, the Norwalk-based developer Spinnaker Real Estate is just about finished building the first phase of the Audubon Square complex: 269 market-rate apartments, a 716-space garage, and up to 5,000 square feet of stores atop a former surface parking lot.
They’ve already begun construction on the project’s Phase 2 along Audubon Street, where 66 new townhouse-style residences between Audubon and State will be.
And a few small piles of dirt (pictured, in front of Phase 1) and busy construction excavators now stand where Phase 3 will be, with the end result being a another 149 new residential units and 6,900 square-feet of first-floor retail in a building at 335 Orange St. at the northeast corner of Orange and Grove. Spinnaker received site plan approval from the City Plan Commission for Phases 2 and 3 back in November 2018.
A little over a mile northwest of Audubon Square is a 30-foot ramp of dirt at 201 Munson St. that has been towering over Shelton Avenue for over a year. Trees and bushes and weeds mix with the remaining cracked pavement and crushed concrete on the 13-acre lot at the border of Dixwell and Newhallville.
Back on July 19, 2017, Double A Development Partners, a partnership of New Canaan-based developer Doug Gray and Denver, Colorado-based developer Brent Anderson, received a special permit from the City Plan Commission to stockpile 26,000 cubic yards of clean soil on the 13-acre former industrial, contaminated site that used to house the Olin Chemical Company.
Ultimately, the developers plan to build a new 400-unit apartment complex on the site, across from Yale’s Science Park and adjacent to the Farmington Canal Line.
But differences between the development partners led to an ownership shake-up in April. The new owners, of which Gray is still a member, still have not submitted a final site plan to the City Plan Commission detailing what the final project will look like.
City Planner Stacey Davis said that, per the developers’ initial special permit, the stockpile had to be depleted and removed by July 31, 2019. The developers had reached out to the department with a request to extend the timeline of the special permit, and that extension request was initially on last week’s City Plan Commission agenda. But the developers subsequently requested that the item be tabled.
And so, for now, the site remains still. With nothing more than a large pile of dirt staring down its neighbors.
Heading back downtown, a more active construction site stands on the block bounded by Crown Street, High Street, York Street, and George Street.
Where once stood a 1960s-era Brutalist parking deck will soon be a new seven-story, 132-unit apartment complex at the address 129 York St. The developer behind the project is Crown Court Apartments LLC, a holding company of New Haven Towers, which owns two other residential buildings housing nearly 250 apartments right next door on the same block.
The developers won site plan approval for the new housing project in July. And, as of earlier this month, they’ve demolished the former parking deck and are working on clearing the site.
Leaving behind for now, as of Wednesday afternoon, a pile not of dirt, but of crumbled blocks of concrete and twisting tubes of metal (pictured) in the fenced off lot.
Heading farther south into the Hill and the city’s medical district, Stamford developer Randy Salvatore’s RMS Companies has dug a new foundation at the corner of Washington Avenue and Lafayette Street (pictured) for one of the many residential projects in its broader Hill-to-Downtown redevelopment plan.
The first phase of that project, a four-story, 110-apartment, mixed-use development at 22 Gold St. called Parkside Crossing, opened in May.
The second phase, which Salvatore’s development company received site plan approval for in March 2018, will create a new six-story, 104-unit apartment building on Lafayette St., a new six-story, 90-unit apartment building on Congress Avenue, and 30 more apartments on Prince Street.
Phase 3 of Hill-to-Downtown, which RMS received site plan approval for in May, will create a new six-story, 223-unit building at 9 Tower Lane.
And just a few blocks away, at Church Street and South Frontage Road overlooking the Oak Street Connector leading to I‑91 and I‑95, a construction project of a slightly different sort has begun.
That’s Phase 2 of the Downtown Crossing project, a years long effort to restitch the Hill and Downtown over the current mess of semi-highways at MLK Boulevard, Rt. 34, and South Frontage Road.
Phase 1, completed in 2016, saw the construction of a pedestrian and road crossing on College Street and the development of the Alexion building.
Phase 3, which is scheduled to be constructed from December 2020 through late 2022, should see the construction of a pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle crossing that connects Temple Street and Congress Avenue.
And Phase 2, for which construction began this summer and should last through the summer of 2021, should see the creation of a pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle crossing at Orange Street over the Oak Street Connector.
During the construction period between Sept. 23 and Oct. 4, according to a newsletter sent out by the city on Sept 20, there will be single lane closures due to construction on the following roads: South Frontage Road between South Orange Street and College Street, MLK Boulevard between Orange Street and Church Street, various sections of North Service Drive, and various sections of South Service Drive.