In The Hill, Lots Of Opportunity Beckon

Kelly Murphy and Erik Johnson did something radical on Lafayette Street: They took a walk.

Not to pick up their car from a parking lot. Not to visit the doctor.

Just to take a walk.

And to make a point.

Nobody else was taking a walk. Every once in a while another human popped up momentarily to retrieve a car from somewhere amid the sea of surface lots.

That was part of Murphy’s and Johnson’s point. They were demonstrating how the portion of the Hill within a mile of Union Station has over the last half-century has deteriorated from a busy neighborhood to a ​“no-man’s land” thanks to New Haven’s headlong dive into urban renewal. They spoke of how it can become a busy neighborhood once again — and serve as fertile land for New Haven to build up its tax base and create jobs, perhaps the last spot of its kind along with some prime spots just across Route 34 downtown like the old Coliseum site. (Click on the video above to walk with them.)

Murphy and Johnson are currently engaged in trying to make that happen. As New Haven government’s economic development director and Livable City Initiative (i.e. neighborhood anti-blight agency) chief, they hold the same jobs as the planners who charted the bulldozing of homes and businesses and social centers in that stretch of the Hill in the 1960s. They have launched a new drive to remake the streets, rezone the land, and entice builders to make Lafayette Street, Church Street South, Tower Lane, and their surroundings friendly to pedestrians and apartment-dwellers and shop owners and office workers.

They call their drive the ​“Hill-to-Downtown Planning Initiative.” It has just started with the help of a $1 million federal ​“transit-oriented development” planning grant (read about that here), funneled through the state, designed to encourage cities to use trains and bus lines as spurs to concentrated new building projects. The goal is to connect the train station with the booming Yale/Yale-New Haven Hospital medical area as well as with downtown. Especially now that young people and seniors have been moving into the city and seem to want to live near the center of activity without relying on cars. Official study language puts the goal this way: ​“to reverse-engineer urban renewal and by making New Haven a continuous and connected city and not a city of enclaves separated by highways.”

Murphy and Johnson don’t pretend to be better intentioned than their counterparts of the urban renewal era. Government planners in their shoes back then believed that cities needed to compete with suburbs to survive by building around the needs of drivers. The planners believed that cities needed to turn main streets into speedways to help them zooming in and out of town, by spreading out vast parking lots so they can park as conveniently as at a suburban office park.

Now the thinking has changed. Now planners believe cities cannot out-suburb the suburbs. They believe cities succeed by building on their strengths as busy places where you can walk places, where you can live, shop, go to work, eat, and socialize all within a compact, attractive space. Like what has been happening in downtown New Haven.

And what Murphy and Johnson envisioned happening along the route of their walk.

“When people think of neighborhoods, they don’t think of parking lots and buildings behind fences,” Murphy said. She was standing outside one such fence, a big fence, at the corner of Lafayette and Church Street South. It surrounds a sprawling parking lot which itself surrounds an island set well back from the street, the 2 Church Street South medical office building.

Johnson and Murphy would like to see that lot filled in, along with perhaps a replacement for the office building, one separated from the street by only an 8‑to-10-foot-wide sidewalk. Yes, the building would need parking — either underground or wrapped around the building in multiple stories.

The initiative won’t end with the city buying properties like these and dictating what gets built there, though, Murphy and Johnson said. They don’t see New Haven reverting to a 1950s- and ​‘60s-style eminent domain spree. Instead, they envision making it worthwhile for owners of all these surface lots to sell them to builders or to build on them themselves. Zoning that more easily allows ​“mixed use” (combinations of homes, stores, restaurants, and/or offices) and requires less parking than in the past would help make that happen, they said. So would wider sidewalks and streets that make sense, unlike some of the area’s cut-throughs that wind in unpredictable directions. The process is starting with the just-begun project to fill in the old Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere, which divided the Hill from downtown. Murphy pointed to the new Gateway Community College campus a mere two blocks north on Church: With the surface lot and the fence and then Route 34 between it and 2 Church Street South, who now would think of walking there or to other nearby destinations?

In fact, before they arrived, a woman leaving 2 Church Street South asked a reporter if he knew anyway to walk out of the parking lot to get across to downtown. She couldn’t see any way out. Downtown seemed far away, not a block away.

“If you work here,” Murphy asked, ​“where do you go to lunch” if you don’t want to drive?

“If you set back all your buildings so far away from the street, you feel disconnected from [stuff that’s] so close to you,” Johnson observed.

She then pointed in the other direction to the forbidding urban renewal-era Lee High School, now being abandoned by its last occupant (Yale’s nursing school). ​“Does that look urban to you, the old Dick Lee high school?” she asked. ​“I don’t think that feels like … any other neighborhood in the city.

“This is an area ripe for development.”

The walk proceeds up Lafayette to Temple Street.

Oh wait. Temple Street wasn’t there. The Route 34 Connector cut it off on the downtown side a half-century ago.

As part of the initiative, once the connector is filled in, Murphy and Johnson would like to see Temple Street continued into the Hill so people can easily walk through. It would link the New Haven Green to the new green space on the Hill’s Amistad Street.

At the other end of Lafayette they came to a crossroads of numerous streets coming from odd angles and directions. All funneling cars to the Connector and I‑91 and I‑95. ​“That funnel that takes you out” of New Haven, Johnson observed. ​“It doesn’t take you across.”

One, two, three, four, five separate surface lots dotted Lafayette, graveyards of the homes and public establishments that once stood above them. The suburban-style two-story College Plaza, a strip mall vestige of urban renewal, loomed in the distance behind yet another surface lot. In order to encourage building on all those lots, the plan is to straighten out the crossroads, straighten out Lafayette, then continue the street in the other direction all the way past the Tower One/Tower East senior complex to the police station.

That sounds far; in fact it’s only a few blocks. That became clear as Murphy and Johnson followed Lafayette across the Church Street South speedway (carefully).

Johnson pointed to a surface lot running along the main road and Tower Lane and by St. Basil’s Greek Orthodox Church. He called that a prime example of a lot that could support a better use. What exactly? That will hinge on a broader change officials hope to see in their lifetimes: the razing and rebuilding of the concrete low-density Church Street South housing projects that begin directly across from Union Station. That change has been delayed by ongoing friction between the city and the complex’s out-of-town government-subsidized private owner. When that eventually gets straightened out, officials envision mixed-income housing, and more of it, on the land, along with retail and perhaps office space. That surface lot on Tower Lane would probably fit into the plan, Johnson said.

So will the opening of Route 1. ​“Route 1 was diverted shortly after Church Street South was completed for safety reasons,” Johnson noted. ​“Remember the highways were not always were they are now. New Haven is the only place were Route 1 is not a continuous route; there are places where there is an alternative Route 1 business route, but this is only place where it route has been closed to vehicular traffic.” He wants streets reconnecting people (including, yes, drivers) in a sensible grid. So you can picture how to get four blocks over to the train station without it seeming like a mile away.

Murphy and Johnson walked another block and a half to South Orange Street. That required cutting through grass and lots. They landed in what Johnson called the ultimate ​“no-man’s land” stretch of the forgotten district: the back end of the Gateway (school board) Meadow Street office building, the back of the police station, the back of the Church Street South projects, the back of a Knights of Columbus printing facility, and an entrance to the Route 34 Connector mini-highway.

No sign of humans. Just parked cars.

“Can you see the train station?” Johnson asked rhetorically.

“Where do these people, how do they get to the work how do they get to the store? It is very isolated,” Murphy said of the projects. ​“That’s why this development was never successful. It was never connected to the neighborhood.”

Opening Route 1 a block away will help, Johnson said. So will reconnecting South Orange Street with Orange Street across a filled-in Route 34.

He and Murphy would like to see the plan include an upgrading of the Gateway office building. Technological change has made most of the squat K of C printing plant obsolete, they said; now much of it is used for storage. They’d like to see a bigger use of that building too. Looking at the empty lot leading to Tower One/Tower East, they predicted a new senior tower rising to accommodate aging Baby Boomers. In the rebuilt, reclaimed stretch of the Hill envisioned by the city, it’ll be easier for those folks to get to, say, the Shubert or Rite Aid or Gateway or the Green. Or to the train or to stores right outside their door, at the new Church Street South.

Who knows? Maybe an old idea — razing the 1970s era police station, moving the cops closer to downtown, and building offices or stores or homes a block from the train station — will even pop up again.

For now, Murphy and Johnson had to walk back to their offices to return to the incremental task of getting the Hill-To-Downtown Initiative started. The walk back to City Hall took maybe 10 minutes. The revival of the downtown edge of the Hill, if it happens, could take a decade or more. As an initial market study nears completion, the city has created a website so members of the public can follow each step — and get involved, offer their own ideas. Click here to find it.