Six levels. Plants and trees. A “parklet.” A little more than half the spaces originally envisioned. Residences, offices and stores wrapped around.
Those were some of the details unveiled Tuesday night as the public got a look at the parking garage project finally about to get underway to support Yale-New Haven Hospital’s new Smilow Cancer Hospital.
About 75 people came to Timothy Dwight School for the presentation by developer Will Smith and Yale-New Haven and city government officials. The plans are the result of extended and often painful negotiations between the city and the hospital.
The vertical parking structure will rise on the much-debated “Lot E,” site, the current surface parking lot surrounded by Legion, North Frontage, Howe, and Dwight. The site will feature not only a six-level 845-space garage (the original proposal was for 1,400 spaces!) to serve and support the rising cancer center, but residential units, office space, and even a little “parklet.”
Sited to be barely visible, the garage, which itself will have a facade of plant-climbing screens, will be “wrapped” by 24 residential units on North Frontage, a three-story office building and retail stores along a traffic-calmed Howe Street; the “parklet” with changing grades and benches to recline on on Dwight Street; and on all four sides new sidewalks graced by noise-abating and pollution fighting trees. It will be called “2 Howe Street.”
The audience at Tuesday night’s preview appeared to include about three times as many city and Yale-New Haven officials as Hill residents.
Still, activists such as Curlena McDonald of the Dwight Management Team (on the right in the photo with Dwight Alder Gina Calder) expressed concerns about congestion, both vehicular and in the lungs; about whether local African-American businesspeople could afford the new retail space; about what kinds of jobs would be created; and about who might live in the residential units.
Will Smith, of Intercontinental Developers, which is building the project and then leasing it all to Yale-New Haven, conceded additional traffic will be added; 80 percent of the traffic is expected to derive from west bounders on North Frontage who turn and enter the garage on Dwight, He described an environmental-state-of the-art garage that will ventilate, award priority spaces to cars that are more efficient, and feature its own photovoltaic cells that will generate, it is hoped, enough electricity on their own to run the entire garage, and thereby offset any pollution add-ons.
As to the 24 residential units, they will be rented to new hospital employees, particularly those the cancer center is trying to attract. They will also be for use of families visiting patients.
Likewise, all the office space will be for Yale-New Haven administrative purposes. (The cancer center’s medical labs and offices will be in the third of the three center sites, on Park Street, which is now passing through its own site plan review.)
Only the retail space will be rentable to people unaffiliated with the hospital. Smith said his firm has had preliminary talks with a bank and a pharmacy eager to compete with Walgreen’s.
“Yes,” he said to Curlena McDonald, “new retail space will cost more, but we are open to all who are interested.”
There were two voices from CORD, the activist organization in the Hill which negotiated a “community benefits package” during the original negotiations for the cancer center. One was this man, James Washington, He angrily said that 40 years ago the houses on the Lot E site were taken away.
These new residential units should be offered to the community. I’m very upset,” he said. Then he left the room.
Rev. Jose Champagne of the Church of God of Prophecy, a leader with the Hispanic Clergy Association, rose and said he was also a CORD member. “Yale [New Haven] did not ask me to speak,” he said. “But I rise to support this project. We need jobs in this community.”
Norman Roth, vice president for administrative affairs at Yale-New Haven Hospital (pictured with New Haven’s City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg and Chrissy Bonanno of the economic development office) said that Yale-New Haven is committed to offering good jobs to local people after and beyond the construction period.
“From nurses to doctors, from security people to environmental, 310 jobs, real ones with benefits, have been created at the hospital over the past two years,” Roth said, and many local people have them.
“Yale [New Haven],” he said, “is committed to the idea that the workforce of the future is here in New Haven.”
He cited partnerships with local high schools and with Gateway Community College, where a $200,000 annual grant helps train the nurses desperately needed. “We hired 21 of the first 23 graduated.”
Officials said that 625 permanent new jobs are to be created specifically as part of the three-part project – the cancer center, the Park Street medical support building, and 2 Howe.
Olivia Marston of the Urban Design League challenged Smith and Gilvarg on the architectural look of the block. “It’s bland,” she said. “There’s nothing iconic about these structures.” There’s not enough connection between the residential units and the offices, she said. And, perhaps, most damning, she asserted the structure clearly prejudices the car over the pedestrian.
“Look,” said Smith, in an interchange, pointed but genial, which characterized the entire proceeding, “we’re not looking to make things iconic. We wanted to strike a balance between the car and the pedestrian. We and Yale want people to walk to work. That’s why, at the Howe corner we’ve built out, calming traffic there, made a place for a van to pick up and drop off people. It’s going to be going on 24 hours, nurses on the night shift.”
“We don’t need more garages,” Marston pressed on. “And if Yale owns the garage, what’s the incentive to get people walking, and not using it?”
Roth and Gilvarg parried. “Yes,” Gilvarg said, “there are net new spaces with the cancer center, but also net new jobs.”
Roth said Yale-New Haven needs the spaces for the growing number of patients and their families, for the retail customers, so “we are incentivized to move on ‘traffic demand reduction’ for employees.” That is, “urging them to take the train, or to leave their cars in outlying lots and we send a van for them.”
Following up on a traffic study, Bonanno said that a system of 13 new signals from York down to Orchard on North Frontage would slowly be implemented to help with the traffic flow. That, along with other aspects of the Route 34 re-do, which is in the bailiwick of the State Traffic Commission, will make the traffic flow around 2 Howe Street more than workable, she said.
It appeared there was no chance the major elements presented would be subject to serious change based on community input. Participants seemed to know that too.
Bonanno said the city felt strongly that the wraparound with retail, office, and residential housing is just right. “We’re comfortable also that it meets the requirements of the development agreement.”
“Much of what people asked for was not any significant change in the elements,” said Smith, “but more information, which we are happy to provide. Also their chief concerns — the circulation of traffic, pollution, and so forth — are really part of larger issues with the State Traffic Commission and the Municipal Development Plan for the Hill, which is evolving. Those are not things we can respond to directly.”
This public hearing was mandated in the original agreement struck for the cancer center. A similar hearing, also mandated, is to be held Wednesday night at Career High School. Then, on Jan. 16, the formal presentation will be made in a site plan review before the City Plan Commission. Because the new ordinance requiring a separate City Plan review for new garages of 200 spaces or more was passed after the cancer center agreement was struck, Lot E, or rather 2 Howe Street, gets to skip that.
If all goes well with approvals and sub-contractor bidding, construction, which should be contained within the site and cause little if any traffic disruption, should commence in September 2008 and take 18 months, with a Jan. 10 completion date.