Town Green: Make That Doughnut A Danish

Win Davis likens the L‑shaped 27-block area of businesses and residents the Town Green District serves to a doughnut, with the New Haven Green — which is technically and legally not in the District — as the hole in the middle of the doughnut. 

He’s excited about changes being contemplated for the city’s iconic public greenspace and thinks the doughnut has a good chance in the years ahead to become a Danish, with the best part of the pastry being right there in the middle.

As the city, the Green’s proprietors, and a new fledgling auxiliary conservancy group offer up new ideas around bus routes and perhaps a reconfigured Temple Street, Davis, who is the long-time executive director of the Town Green Special Services District, talked to the Independent about the changing, and not unfraught, relationship of the District to the Green and to the city, and about his pastry analogy.

Here are some highlights from that interview:

New Haven Independent: You began working for the District not long after it was established in the late 1990s. How has it grown and evolved in general and in relation to the Green?

Win Davis: Since 2001, when I started, the District has grown in terms of our duties. When I started there were three of us and now it’s six [plus 25 other employees who do the work out on the streets, the uniformed ​“Ambassadors”]. We started off as a cleaning program as most [special service] districts do. But we’ve added safety, hospitality, then beautification with our flower program now up to 300, including hanging baskets, planters, the pots in front of City Hall.

The District is about 300 properties, and with our mill rate [by state law, and after a vote of its members, a special services district can levy additional property tax on its members to pay for services] it generates $1.8 million a year. There’s other revenue, some grants, some earned, and some contributions, totaling about $2.2 million. Property values continue to rise, and so do our costs. The ​“Ambassadors” are upwards of 60 percent of our budget, but everyone needs to get paid.

How would you describe the relationship of the District to the Green regarding issues like garbage pick up, special events, and so forth?

The Green is not in the District. I lovingly refer to it as the hole in the middle of our doughnut. Since I got to Town Green I’ve wanted to turn that doughnut into a Danish. Because for me the middle of the Danish is the best part, and I feel like the Green could be the best part of our downtown. Over time the District’s taken on a lot more responsibility, from not even touching the trash barrels downtown to owning and maintaining them completely.

Many people wonder why the Ambassadors, who collect the trash on Downtown streets, are not part of maintaining the cleanliness on the Green itself. Can you elucidate some of this for us?

When we began, the city didn’t know what to think of us, but over time our working relationship has evolved to a place where Town Green is a partner to the city in many aspects of running the district. 

The garbage is really a big deal for us. In 2010 the city stopped picking up trash downtown and we had to figure out a system to keep downtown clean, and we shifted very quickly and now maintain trash cans for the city. [This came about because] we were told by the city they were going to put downtown on the once-a-week pick-up as the rest of the city. We said that won’t work for us, so we came up with a system so that we were supplied with dumpsters and they would empty them a couple of times a week. Town Green collects it, Ambassadors drive it into a tunnel under the Omni, in the underground road there, and the city disposes of it at the transfer station.

And the Ambassadors don’t touch the trash cans on the Green?

The Parks Department has an agreement with the Proprietors to maintain the Green, and the Parks labor is unionized. They want to maintain the work they have on the Green, and I get it.

But are there, apart from trash pick-up, other relationships or contracts between the District and the city or Proprietors?

Town Green was hired by the Proprietors to maintain furniture around the flag pole. [The Ambassadors] put it out, wipe down the furniture at night. The Ambassadors will do a quick clean up around the fountain. And as our cleaners are about, they’ll cut across the Green to do some maintenance at lunch time, then at night lock it up [tether the individual pieces to each other for security]. 

The Town Green and the city do not have an operating agreement with regard to trash pick-up, or anything. We acknowledge we’re all working toward the same goal and over time our relationships with the city departments have grown. A few examples are we’ve planted trees together and gotten information out in emergencies.

What’s your take on the evolving ideas for new uses on the Green that have come up in the recent public meetings — kiosks, a café perhaps, other forms of commerce, bathrooms?

Town Green is staffed by urban place management professionals. We believe the more activity on the Green, the better. I’d like to see ten different things people can do on the Green. They could be anything from just benches to sit on, a place to eat lunch, a place to get coffee. Or to get a drink of water! To go to the bathroom. A dog park. Anything that brings activity. 

[Davis refers to a notion called ​“the power of ten,” espoused by Fred Kent, the director of Project for Public Spaces, who indeed was hired by the Proprietors to do a ​“revisioning” of the Green back in 2010.] He said, ​‘If you see people kissing in a public space, that means it’s a pretty healthy public space.’ I think we’re moving in the right direction.

So, if you were in charge, what would be your priority? What would you wish to see on the Green?

It would be to get ten different things on the Green, amenities and not necessarily events, which are difficult, costly, and take resources and time. If you were to go over to Temple Plaza [one of the two public places, in addition to Pitkin Plaza on Orange Street, that the District does manage], for example, there’s a water fountain and there’s a bowl for dogs. And we have tables and chairs, and that’s only three things! And, by the way, we’re going to be putting a dog park in Temple Plaza in the spring, partnering with the Parking Authority.

So when we’re thinking of the Green, it’s not necessarily Arts & Ideas kinds of things, but thoughtful ideas to make the Green cozy and human-scale. That’s one of the problems, to make it human-scale. It takes a huge amount of resources to make any event on the Green feel like it belongs on the Green size-wise because it’s so big, two city blocks wide. So getting ​“the power of ten” on the Green would be tremendous, and a lot of the thought at the last city meeting is in line with this.

What have you heard from the business owners on these issues?

I hesitate to generalize. I will say that at Town Green we think [not only] of our business owners, but property owners, our residents, and our visitors. The changes that are being discussed would be nice for everyone. If the Green had a few more things to do, people would spend more time there, downtown. Part of our mission is to create an internationally competitive downtown urban environment, but everybody’s issues are growing. We’re all dealing with the opioid epidemic and the housing crisis and that’s happening everywhere. Still we’d like to have a downtown that can compete with a Providence or a Montreal.

Well that brings me to public bathrooms, which have been discussed both at the recent meeting and in the pages of the Independent. The chair of the Proprietors, Judge Janet Arterton, said she was not inclined to consider permanent infrastructure-style bathrooms on the Green. She suggested there may be space across from the Green, in fact on the ground floor of 900 Chapel St., which houses your offices. What do you think of that suggestion?

Yes, there are vacancies there. They’d have to talk to the landlord. Some are several thousand square feet.

Would the District like to get more involved on the Green?

The Green is a wonderful place for large events, to bring people together, but it’s not quite the venue, for example, to host a neighborhood movie. For that you need infrastructure, power, water, sewer. And there’s no cozy space there. We much prefer to have our ​“activations” occur adjacent to our residents and our businesses. So from that point of view the Green is a kind of island, its own environment.

What by your lights has been one of the best uses of the Green in recent times?

One of the coolest events was Black Wall Street. That started on Temple Plaza, but it outgrew itself in one year, and they filled up the lower Green. But that’s the point: You need hundreds of vendors to make it look like something. One of the main tenets of the 2010 Fred Kent Project for Public Spaces study was a recommendation to make smaller spaces [on the Green]. 

I loved and still do love many of the suggestions that also included more human-sized spaces, improving the gateways to and from, narrowing the distance to the Green. The new plans have a lot of the older plan that was not implemented. Actually, the tables and chairs [around the flag pole] was one of them.

Optimistic? What are your thought about the immediate changes ahead?

People are finally coming together and it looks as if we’re finally talking about what the Green should be for us, for now. The Green has always evolved to serve needs: When we needed a graveyard, there it was. When we needed a state house, a place to graze, there it was. And then those uses went away for one reason or another. Now we’re getting into the mindset of what the space needs to be for this New Haven, for now, for the present.

See below for other recent articles about the Green.

• Green Proprietor: ​“We Are Not The Committee Of​‘No’ ”
• City Historian: The Green’s Constant Is Change, &​“Public Good”
• Prof/Filmmaker: The Green’s Not Just About Fun
• Green Remakers Face Grave Question
• Big Changes Eyed For The Green