The Coliseum Never Died

Yeah, it blew up. But it returns to consciousness on CPTV Monday night — a reminder that its legacy lives on in the questions New Haven is asking about its future.

At first glance ​“The Last Days Of The Coliseum” feels like a look backward. Indeed the documentary — made by Quinnipiac University’s Rich Hanley, and airing on CPTV at 9 p.m. Monday — takes us back to the rock-and-hockey palace’s roots at the former New Haven Arena, through the building’s noisy and ultimately catastrophic three decades of operation (hockey teams kept folding; the airborne garage starting crumbling in its second decade), ending with that unforgettable blast on a January morning in 2007.

Hanley walks us through the dreams of Mayor Richard C. Lee, who wanted to rebuild New Haven with dramatic, towering edifices. He reminds us of the famous rock acts and short-lived hockey teams and circuses that drew thousands to the concrete fortress that greeted drivers entering downtown.He brings die-hard fans and promoters before the camera to attest to the meaning the downtown stadium held for them and the memories they hold to this day.

“We want to score higher ratings than the other stuff on TV that night to let Connecticut know the building may be gone but it’s not forgotten!” beckons an appeal to viewers on the film’s Facebook page. (Click on the play arrow to watch the trailer.)

But the story is about far more than nostalgia, and the most enduring presence isn’t the building, but a now elderly man named Kevin Roche, the famous architect who moved here to build the New Brutalist behemoth. He sat for Hanley’s camera and demonstrated the human spirit that animated that concrete monster.

In ​“Last Days,” Roche, his Dublin accent intact along with his vigor, is seen defending to the end an approach that has fallen into disfavor with New Urbanists, an outdated modernism in these post-modern times. Roche makes the argument that the Coliseum could have been a contender, if only the city hadn’t run out of money and failed to build the glass front and street-level storefronts that would have humanized it and made it more viable. He voices no second thoughts about winding sky-high helix ramps and open-air heaven-ascending escalators that look cool in models but scared the bejezsus out of humans, some of whom needed a police escort to brave the egress.

Most of all, Roche expresses no regrets about aiming high.

“It is not the first time in history,” he tells the camera in ​“Last Days,” that a vision failed.”

As Hanley points out in the documentary, New Haven hasn’t given up pursuing renewal. It has visions for its future. He argues that maybe middle-class Baby Boomer arena rock and pro sports don’t fit into that vision.

The city today sees its economic salvation not in suburban-style malls and arenas but in ​“eds and meds” development. Like the new Gateway Community College campus rising a block from the Coliseum site. Like the Yale-New Haven Smilow Cancer Hospital another few blocks away. Like a planned biotech expansion called Downtown Crossing above a refilling of the Route 34 ​“highway to nowhere” that hugged the Coliseum’s southern flank. Like a medical-related development envisioned further west on the Legion Avenue median strip that buried an old neighborhood to make way for the highway extension that never came.

Still, the Coliseum lives on, in some ways, just a block north, on Crown Street, now the regional clubbing magnet. Thousands of young suburban adults looking for rowdy action in the city now flock there on weekend nights instead of the Coliseum. And the debates revisited in Hanley’s film have returned: Does New Haven want that kind of mayhem in its downtown? Should the city subsidize it for suburban crowds? How should the police handle it? And are we — as Hanley suggests about a city that kept the Beatles from performing at Westville, banned Alan Freed from the Arena, arrested Jim Morrison onstage, and generally preferred Sinatra to Cheap Trick — still a bunch of Puritans?

While the New Urbanist vision of smaller, human-scale buildings has larger replaced the Coliseum complex, downtown has in fact just hatched the state’s largest apartment complex (32 stories) and is on its way to hosting a Roche-like grand architect’s showpiece (this time it’s Sir Norman Foster) in the under-construction new Yale School of Management complex. (It looks like the glass is staying in this time, and lots of it.)

Even though the Coliseum failed, city planners’ vision of a more upscale downtown did materialize. Swanky restaurants, a reborn Shubert, and art galleries draw big crowds now, too. The original plan for replacing part of the Coliseum property, in fact, called for a new home of Long Wharf Theatre. Then that plan got shelved, at least for now.

That means the grave of the old Coliseum lies below a 4.5‑acre surface parking lot for the indefinite future. Listen closely as you pass the grave; you just might hear the pounding of pachyderms, the screams of WWE fans and denizens of the Nighthawks ​“Jungle,” or the flicking of the Zippo-wielding masses sanctifying an Aerosmith or Judas Priest encore. Will these ghosts haunt us? Or inspire us?