Allan Appel Photo
Preservationist Pedro Soto.
More pocket parks. Food carts. Great views. Pedestrian friendly retail. Walls made of plants. Parking lots activated as green markets.
And make sure real live human beings show up in the picture.
Those were among the ideas urged on city planners readying a new project called Downtown Crossing.
The ideas emerged as nearly 100 people gathered Tuesday night at the downstairs meeting room at the library’s main branch.
Downtown Crossing aims to transform the Route 34 Connector from a limited access highway to an “urban boulevard” by filling part of it in and create 10 acres of developable land for labs and offices between the North and South Frontage Roads. It will make way for developer Carter Winstanley to build a $140 million, 10-story building of labs and offices on a piece of no-man’s land between College Street and the Air Rights Garage
Planner Alex Krieger.
Gone at Tuesday night’s forum was the language of “stitching neighborhoods together,” which had been part of the lingo at previous public meetings on the ambitious plan to fill in the ditch of Route 34 and create new cross streets linking downtown, the medical district, and Union Station. People focused more on details they believe could make a difference.
“A lot of worries and fears can come out [of the process], but think about the benefits and the great things that can come out,” consulting planner Alex Krieger urged on participants.
Notable in his remarks and the feedback of participants from breakout groups was the acknowledgment that however the design evolves, there are in effect no neighborhoods left to stitch together. Urban renewal — including building the mini-highway that Downtown Crossing aims to fill back in — destroyed them. That sense had emerged at the last meeting in June, which more contentious than Tuesday night’s meeting of minds.
From left: Architect Toshi Karato with preservationists Anstress Farwell & Pedro Soto.
Anstress Farwell of the Urban Design League urged Krieger and city planners to perhaps reconceive the project not as a “downtown crossing” but as a “widening,” as she put it.
“How do we re-center our retail environment again? It used to be at Church and Chapel. Maybe think of it [the project] not as a crossing downtown but widening downtown,” Farwell said.
At a “placemaking” workshop, one of several sessions that were part of Tuesday’s event, Krieger asked, “Where might we make new public places in this vision?”
He acknowledged Farwell’s idea with a positive nod of the head and said to a small throng gathered around his map, “Help us.”
New Haven Preservation Trust’s Pedro Soto suggested that the spot where the new ‘urban boulevard” of Frontage Road passes what will be the curved wall of the library of the new Gateway Community College might have the potential to be such a humanizing place.
“You’ll have thousands of people passing,” he said.
Another participant suggested that the little (and little-used) park on Amistad Street in the medical district might become such a destination for humans.
“Nothing’s going on there now,” said the city economic development chief Kelly Murphy, one of the conveners of the gathering.
Molly Wheeler.
Participant Molly Wheeler suggested that the food carts at Cedar Street might be a model as a place for workers in future buildings to gather. She also urged on Krieger to create buildings with views so people “see the Hill and the downtown streets” so that a visual connection occurs.
Complete Streets activist Mark Abraham suggested that the food carts work well, bringing pedestrian life on Cedar Street by the hospital, precisely because the vehicular traffic moved very slowly there.
The key to the entire development, he suggested, is slowing traffic both on the to-be-created crossing streets and on the two urban “boulevards” to be created out of the speedways of the Frontage Roads.
Did he in effect want food carts on the new boulevards? Yes, Abraham nodded, but acknowledged that the state Department of Transportation has heretofore never permitted speeds on such roads in Connecticut to be lowered sufficiently to make that happen.
As a preservationist, Soto acknowledged that the plan doesn’t preserve much that currently exist. But it marks the return of a grid, an historic feature of the city such as the Nine Squares.
As to reviving open space, pocket parks, and plazas, he cautioned developers, “The only open spaces that are successful are surrounded by activity” like the Green.
Other participants urged green walls to be required of developers in the design guidelines. Green walls are a hot new eco-trend; they’re made at least in part out of plants or other living materials. (In some cases you water your wall to keep it up.)
Yet others in the economic impact workshop urged planners to make room for small developers. Tony Bialecki, New Haven’s deputy director of economic development, reported out that the infrastructure costs are so great in the project, the likely only way for a small developer to participate would be to link up with a bunch more to share those costs.
On Monday night the Board of Aldermen delayed the project. It delayed signing off on having the city accept a $16 million federal grant to defray costs on the first phase of the $21 million project. Aldermen wanted to learn more, especially how the city, already facing a gaping budget hole, proposed to pay for a new $5 million matching requirement.
Murphy promised to communicate with the aldermen to move the project forward. “You want the elected body up to speed,” she said. Pointing to Route 34 on the map, she said, “Do we want another 45 years of this separation?”
City Of New Haven Illustration
Phase I of the project (in red).