Perkins Eastman
Initial rendering unveiled Tuesday night; dream-team designer Fang with participants at meeting (below).
Imagine this day spent on Long Wharf: You take a trolley or bike through the “stormwater” park that strategically connects to the Farmington Canal trail to the expanded IKEA “village,” where you buy furniture or browse shops and restaurants. Then you jump back on the trail and head to the New Haven Food Terminal to pick up fresh produce and other sundries for a picnic. You take your bike and picnic lunch on a water taxi that ferries you across the Long Island Sound for an afternoon at Lighthouse Park.
You can’t do any of that in the city’s Long Wharf District now. If a preliminary new vision unveiled for the district takes form, you just might be able to.
Those were some of the initial ideas that neighbors and a team hired to design a strategic development and economic plan for the city’s Long Wharf District dreamed up during an inaugural community meeting Tuesday night.
More than 50 people packed into the Betsy Ross Magnet School cafeteria to hear from the men who designed and planned a $2 billion transformation of a mile and a half stretch of Washington D.C.‘s Southwest waterfront.
Now the men are turning their attention to New Haven’s Long Wharf. The city has hired them to create a plan that transforms a nearly 60-year-old filled-in waterfront district that is currently a disconnected mashup of transportation, maritime use, manufacturing, retail, lodging, and entertainment into a cohesive destination that is a grand gateway to the city.
Eric Fang, who is leading the Long Wharf project for Perkins Eastman, said he and firm principal Stan Eckstut have never seen anything quite like the Long Wharf district. And that’s saying something. Their team has designed projects all over the world.
“It’s kind of interesting,” Fang said. “This area is very unique in that everything is coming together here. You have a mix of uses that didn’t happen in any real planned way.” But that’s not a bad thing, he said.
“The opportunities are tremendous,” he said. “We just have to figure out how to re-jigger it.”
5 Long Wharfs, Not 1
A public market like this one in Vancouver could be the central focus of a more walkable Food Terminal District.
The Long Wharf District encompasses nearly 400 acres and is about a mile across from end to end. But the Eastman Perkins team said they see within it at least five subdistricts that are defined by what’s there now: Sports Haven, IKEA, the Food Terminal, Assa Abloy, and Jordan’s and the former Gateway Community College.
Fang said his team has spoken to managers at IKEA who admitted the way their stores are built in the United States — isolated big box stores surrounded by parking — are an anomaly for the popular Scandinavian furniture chain. In Europe, IKEA stores are surrounded by other shops and restaurants which encourages foot traffic that benefits all the businesses.
When it comes to the food terminal, the team sees an opportunity to make it a more pedestrian-friendly destination by possibly creating a public market similar to one in Vancouver where people buy fresh produce and other products direct from the wholesalers who operate in the area now.
The West End would feature a more pedestrian-friendly street scape.
In the Assa Abloy and Jordan’s and 1 Long Wharf, or what they call the West End, which has become a hub for medical offices, the Eastman Perkins team sees an opportunity to attract complimentary businesses such as other home-related business and manufacturing, health and wellness-related business, along with restaurants.
Fang said that Jordan’s Furniture, which also is home to an indoor ropes course and other entertainment, could be more of a draw to the district “if they turned themselves inside out,” and making it more apparent that there is more than just furniture in the building.
A key challenge for making Long Wharf a more attractive destination is making it as walkable as the rest of the city, Eckstut said.
“What makes a city is walking. It’s not the suburbs where we’re driving. The real value in New Haven is all these walkable districts and a walkable downtown. That’s what makes it so special.”
Eckstut said the district, like the rest of the city, has great bones. It’s a matter of enhancing what is already here, particularly the city’s underutilized harbor.
“We’re not looking to take something from other places and bring it here,” he said. “We’re trying to make something that is one of a kind and unique to the world because this is unique to the world. There’s no place like it.”
Planning Ahead
Eastman Perkins
The five subdistricts that make up Long Wharf District.
One not-unique suggestion Eckstut made: using stormwater parks to mitigate the area’s potential for flooding. The city is already engaged in repairing and shoring up infrastructure damaged during big storms like Irene and Sandy. He said such parks are used throughout the world to deal with flood waters.
Stormwater parks would be a central part of fighting floodwaters and adding beauty throughout the district.
He said even Frederick Law Olmsted used them in his design of the linear park system known as the Emerald Necklace that protects Boston (and a similar plan for New Haven that never was fully implemented). In New Haven, such a park and trail system would weave around the existing buildings and connect to the waterfront but also back to neighborhoods like the Hill and Wooster Square. Eckstut said the New Haven harbor, the largest in the Long Island Sound, also is underutilized.
“This is an area of the city with no amenities,” he said. “It’s all parking and hardscape. The truth is, if we can get something out of stormwater management that creates an amenity, there will be more private investment.”
Neighbors exchange ideas Tuesday night.
State Rep. Juan Candelaria: Creating better access to the waterfront is a must.
After his presentation, neighbors were turned loose to think through their own ideas about an improved Long Wharf District — like making it easier to navigate under the highway to get to the waterfront and more public transportation to get around Long Wharf and back to downtown. Other ideas included providing some sort of city-run trolley and water taxis service that can take people from the harbor to Lighthouse Park and even Long Island.
Long Wharf’s own proposed “Emerald Necklace.”
Downtown Alder Abby Roth said she’d like to see an outdoor amphitheater on the waterfront. She noted that she does a lot of walking from downtown and though Long Wharf is close, the aesthetics of the area make walking around in the district mentally challenging. Stormwater parks would go far in making things more pleasant but so would better light for safety, she said.
City Plan Commissioner Leslie Radcliffe: Historic trail could connect to the Farmington Canal trail.
Many in attendance praised the idea of creating a public market in the Food Terminal section of the district to make it more publicly accessible. They also suggested emphasizing New Haven’s history along the waterfront, including by keeping the Freedom Schooner Amistad in the Harbor year round.
Acting City Plan Director Mike Piscitelli said the Long Wharf District is home to more than 2,000 jobs. This plan will determine how the city will “stitch together this district for the next generation,” he said.
“Long Wharf is a very important district for the city and the region as a whole,” he said.