Fearing an invasion of concrete parking “bunkers” and repeats of urban planning blunders past, neighbors packed the Timothy Dwight School Community room Tuesday night to hear —” and throw objections at —” plans for two big new developments on Howe Street and along Route 34. “People are worried,” said Alderwoman Joyce Chen (in photo).
“Something must be happening here tonight!” Dwight Central Management Team co-chair Curlena MacDonald joked in an effort to lighten the tension as she called to order the meeting to order.
The first issue before the group was Yale’s proposal for Lot 80, the site of an existing parking lot fenced in by chain-link along Edgewood Avenue and Howe Street. In the coming months, Yale intends to begin transforming the lot into a new complex for its sculpture program, with a four-story, 50,000 square-foot studio building facing Park Street, an adjacent gallery opening onto Edgewood, and a four-story parking garage above street-level retail space facing Howe.
The second, stickier agenda-item involved plans by the City’s Office of Economic Development for residential and retail, biomedical and garage development along the ‘no man’s land’ Route 34 corridor. About this still-open wound from Urban Renewal failure of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, the gathered neighbors and West River Association members had especially potent feelings.
“People First”
After a ritual Public Safety report from Lt. Ray Hassett —” recounting a month of comparatively low crime in the neighborhood —” Mike Morand of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State affairs took the floor to address Lot 80. Making reference to the pink fliers someone had passed out which read, ‘People First! Cars Second,’ Morand assured that Yale’s was a “People-First” proposal.
The building would be a “beacon on the block,” Morand said, replacing with art, vitality, and light what is now a “missing tooth.” Morand likened the design to development along Grove Street at State, with lively retail along the sidewalk and the parking out of the way up above —” only “a lot lot lot lot better,” he promised, citing improvements in the technology of the screen that will block out the car lights onto Howe. Joined by Yale Facilities Representative Tom Tosich, Morand reminded residents that replacement parking would be a community need with the current lot gone, as well as a requirement by City code.
Acting president of the West River Association John Jones wasn’t convinced that Howe Street could accommodate the 80-plus extra cars the bigger parking space would draw. Reiterating other neighbors’ grievances about Howe traffic as it is, Jones protested plans for a “21st-century building, on a 20th-century street.”Realtor and former Alderwoman Olivia Martson’s doubt was about a parking garage leading to revitalization. If Howe Street vitality is truly a university priority, she asked, then why not have the art building facing Howe and the garage facing Park?Anstress Farwell of the Urban Design League zeroed in on Morand’s avowal that the Lot 80 development would respect existing building scale, with the Edgewood gallery corresponding to the smaller residences on that avenue, and the garage on par with the apartment buildings on Howe Street. Farwell said this meant plans in scale with the buildings across Howe Street —” “but go look at the one-story buildings next to it!” She urged fellow residents to take a very careful look at the drawings on display.
Morand reiterated Yale’s interest in community feedback, but added that they’d “done a lot of talking, and now was time for doing.”Cars vs. Mass Transit
Next up on the agenda was city deputy economic development chief Wendy Clarke and a small team from City Hall, to present a slideshow and drawn plans for the Route 34 corridor. Moving briskly through the map of the corridor, Clark signaled intended residential and retail development at the Southeast end, with possible green space, and biomedical and parking intentions for the Northwest end toward Route 10. Recalling the destructive history of the Urban Renewal era (a neighborhood was destroyed on that land to make way for a highway that was never built), she said that the existing road system would be maintained. Outlining goals of job creation and expanding the tax base, as well as welcoming the newest in biomedical research, Clarke emphasized the collaborative nature of the proposal. Besides stakeholders like Yale and Saint Raphael’s, Clarke said, Dwight and West River communities had played an advising role.
An early voice of concern belonged to longtime (now former) president of the West River Association, Jerry Poole. Reputed to carry around his own group’s ten-year-old plans for the corridor zone, now beat up nearly beyond legibility, Poole identified sharp differences between the city’s proposal and the West River Association’s. This new plan is about big-box buildings, and bringing people in from the outside, he said, while the neighbors’ plan is about “blending with community fabric” and creating jobs for people from the neighborhood.
Poole’s main concern was about the two or three parking garages proposed to surround the biomedical buildings in Lots 4 and 5 at the northwest end of the corridor. At a late-January meeting of the West River Association and project planners at Saint Raphael’s, Poole had seen, he said, an aerial plan with three parking garages, which had been omitted from this presentation. The exact number of garages under proposal remained a matter of confusion.
Others said there should be no garages in the corridor at all: that mass-transit options should be explored, or that parking should be accommodated at the site of the Air Rights Garage.
Neighborhood Alderwoman Joyce Chen contributed her assessment of constituent concerns about the environmental impact. “Two thousand is a lot of cars,” said Chen, in reference to Clarke’s figure of 1,958 parking spots in Lots 4 and 5. “People are worried.” Other voices joined in, citing already-high asthma rates in the area.
New Howe Street resident Jerry Martin’s question was about affordable housing. In answer to an earlier inquiry from State Rep. Toni Walker, Clarke gave 200-plus as the number of projected low and mixed-income units, of the 600-plus total residential units. Martin worried that subsidized housing sold outright would soon be housing sold at market-rates, and proposed consideration of a land trust — something so that “affordable now means affordable in the future.” He portrayed the city’s ownership of the land as “the battle half won.”
For one neighborhood resident, Clarke’s condemnation of the “highway that led to nowhere” was simply not strong enough: “Ill-conceived? They killed the [Oak Street] neighborhood!” For many, a sense of past wrongs done the Route 34 zone lent gravity to development decisions and the process of revitalization.
Bill Bixby, a Dwight citizen active on the neighborhood group’s Public Safety Committee, opposed the plans for parking “monoliths,” where what is sorely needed is something to “join the neighborhoods.”
“There’s been enough bad history with redevelopment there,” Bixby said. “We have to take care and avoid those mistakes this time.”
After the meeting, Poole and his West River Association successor John Jones were still talking about the aerial-view image they’d seen at a meeting at Saint Raphael’s on Jan. 25 —” missing, they said, from the presentation tonight. “A month back it was one garage, then two, and then it jumped to three!” said Jones. “I’ve got my eye on it.”
“When you see that aerial view!” said Poole. “It’s like a concrete bunker. They didn’t show it.”
Bixby, also dissatisfied with the level of detail, would also have wanted from both presenters “better visuals. We should be seeing as much as they can possibly show us.”
When the Community Room cleared, McDonald (at center in photo) and Empower New Haven Board Member Christine Bartlett-Josie debriefed, expressing a similar hope that debate would remain open. “It’s a matter of dialogue,” said Bartlett-Josie. “What we want is more dialogue.”
“When you have power you can ignore your environment,” added McDonald, easing off her feet after the two-hour meeting. “Unless the people who are poor and disenfranchised, the people adversely effected, speak out in a loud enough way.”