Michael Melford Photo
Every New England Green is a civic platform, a respite from hubbub. But it’s also a blank canvass for social, cultural, and political event.
Just think about it. Greens are the void that let the Meeting house project both religious presence and governmental focus. Town meetings, Sunday services all had to get across a Green to happen in the 17th century.
But that was then. Now, an eight-year recession has meant it was occupied in protest and offered up as an economic engine by the city, and now increasingly become a fair-weather haven for those who have fallen thru the social safety net into drugs, poverty dementia and crime.
Maybe that’s appropriate: the centrality of God and self-governance were reflected in the generation of the Green when those freedoms were the most important things in New Haven’s populace. Now the undeniable changes in urban culture are presented full-on in the newly chaotic and criminal space, central to New Haven’s original nine-square layout. But it also begs the question: where exactly in the Green going?
Join me in this episode of “Design Czar” as I take a look. You can listen to the episode by clicking on the audio above.
The Green was originally designed in the 1600s for a dense city of over one million people.
New Haven never grew that large, so the space is far too big - bigger than the central square of Mexico City, which is the world's largest urban area.
The Lower Green is a good size for a public square, but the Upper Green is a waste of space and should be filled in with high-density, taxable development, once the city can figure out how to make new development beautiful again (it's a silly idea now, of course, because we'd end up getting something ugly like the new Route 34 stuff). One idea would be to split the state capitol between New Haven and Hartford, like it had been for many decades, and build a beautiful new state capitol building on one corner.