Peabody Plans Progress

The City Plan Commission has signed off on Yale’s proposed renovation of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, paving the way for significantly more exhibition space, bus parking, and pedestrian connections to Yale’s Science Hill.

The new design doesn’t include a cafeteria, so visitors made hungry by the insects and dinosaurs on display will still have to find lunch elsewhere — to the disappointment of some commissioners.

The commissioners unanimously approved Yale’s site plan for the redesigned natural history museum at last week’s regular monthly City Plan Commission on the second floor of City Hall.

Yale Community Affairs Associate Karen King said that the Peabody Museum, which was created in 1866, has been in its current building at the corner of Sachem Street and Whitney Avenue in East Rock for the past 93 years.

“It’s been long overdue for a renovation,” she told the commissioners.

At the meeting last Wednesday evening, Yale Major Projects Planner Kristina Chmelar walked the commissioners through many of the proposed updates she discussed at a recent East Rock Community Management Team meeting, here fleshed out with a bit more detail for the technical site plan reviewers.

Yale will build a new four-story, 45,000-gross-square-foot addition to the Science Hill side of the existing museum property. The downstairs area of the addition will have dedicated classrooms for K‑12 students. The upper floors will have classrooms reserved for Yale students and researchers. And the main floor of the addition will have a double-height central gallery that will allow the museum to increase its exhibition area by around 50 percent.

“Peabody wants to keep a lot of its collections downtown on site to use for teaching,” she said. After all, the museum currently displays only between 2 and 5 percent of its collection. ​“This is going to be a huge improvement for them.”

The newly designed museum will also have a new bus drop off area on Sachem Street that will allow for three school buses to pull over and drop off students without blocking existing parking spaces and without filling the entire sidewalk with scurrying students.

Langan Engineering Vice President Timothy Onderko, the engineer on the redesign project, said that the existing Sachem Street curb will be pushed towards the museum to allow for a 12-foot-wide bus drop off area that is three buses long. The sidewalk, currently around six feet wide, will also be widened to 12 feet, so that pedestrians walking across Sachem won’t be obstructed by a students streaming from school buses into the museum.

“Students can get off, you’re not blocking the sidewalk entirely,” he said. ​“Adjacent to the bus drop off is a double wide sidewalk.” The new site will also have 54 bike racks, and will have 38 dedicated parking spaces (the same number it currently has) at the adjacent Yale Lot 22, which will see its total number of parking spaces decrease from 291 to 272.

Chmelar added that the new design will also include a terrace that connects the Cretaceous area of the museum to Yale’s Science Hill, a gently-sloping spiral ramp at the corner of Sachem and Whitney, and new plantings curated not just by a landscape architect, but also by Peabody staff who will focus on plant species relevant to the prehistoric eras on display inside the museum.

She said that construction will take place between March 2020 and the fall of 2022, and that the grand re-opening of the museum will take place in the fall of 2023, after a year’s of reinstallation of the Peabody’s collection. Yale Vice President Lauren Zucker added that all of the after school programs hosted at the Peabody will still take place, just at other sites on campus, while the museum is closed for renovation.

“People ask all the time about food,” City Plan Commission Chair Ed Mattison said. ​“Maybe there’s something you want to say about food service…”

“Its not going to have a cafe,” Chmelar replied. The renovated museum will still have a gift shop, she said. But no new area to buy food on site.

Zucker said that the museum will continue to post signs inside the museum that recommend hungry visitors check out the restaurants a few blocks away at Audubon Street and Whitney Avenue.

“Children hit metabolic cliffs that happen much faster than the walk to Audubon Street,” said Westville Alder and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand, who is also a father of two. ​“They’re looking at the polar bear, then 30 seconds later, they’re dying for food and they’re not gonna make it to Audubon.

“As much as it’s wonderful that you’re showing some love to those business down the way, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, I think it’s also good to point out the food businesses that are a very quick walk, just a half-a-block away, for families that need to respond immediately.”