Thomas Breen photo
Yale planner Jeromy Powers with a design of the new field house.
Yale won key city approvals to build a two-story field house for its soccer and lacrosse teams and a new natural grass field right across the street at the university’s Westville athletics complex.
Those site plan approvals came Wednesday night during the City Plan Commission’s regular monthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.
Yale Lead Planner Jeromy Powers, along with university Community Affairs Associate Karen King and local attorney Joseph Hammer, presented the commissioners with site plan applications for a new 34,800 square-foot field house at 67 and 165 Central Ave. and a new 2.8‑acre natural grass field at 40 Central Ave., both of which are adjacent to the university’s current soccer and lacrosse field, Reese Field.
The new natural grass field will be built atop the site of the former Yale Armory, which the university tore down due to structural decay, while the new field house will contain team rooms, lockers, shower facilities, film rooms, strength and conditioning rooms, and coaches’ offices for the university’s men’s and women’s varsity soccer and lacrosse teams.
Powers explained that the old Yale Armory site will be used as a construction staging ground as the new field house is being built.
He also showed the commissioners that the field house construction project will include the addition of a raised crosswalk on Central Avenue as a traffic calming and pedestrian safety measure.
City Plan Commissioners Leslie Radcliffe, Adam Marchand, Jonathan Wharton.
This single crosswalk proved to be a point of contention between the university applicants and city staff and commissioners, not because the latter disapproved of traffic calming on the 50-foot wide Westville avenue. But because two raised crosswalks separated by a short distance would likely be much more effective at protecting pedestrians and slowing down cars than the lone crosswalk included in the proposal.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said that adding another raised crosswalk on Central Avenue would create a “corridor effect” of encouraged sustained, slower speeds, as opposed to giving the impression that one can speed before a crosswalk, slow down temporarily, and then speed again afterwards.
“I think that a second would really enhance what you’re trying to do here,” he said.
Westville Alder and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand agreed. He lives near the fields. His district abuts the area. He frequently bikes down to Yale sporting events with his two boys. And he can attest firsthand that cars coming off of Derby Avenue down Central Avenue routinely drive around 50 miles per hour, in large part because the road is so wide at that point.
“Having more than one of them [raised crosswalks] I think would add a great benefit to the area,” he said.
But despite the tag team insistence, the applicant remained unmoved. “We’d ask that you accept the application as is,” Hammer said multiple times over the course of the 15-minute discussion about the crosswalks.
You could essentially copy and paste the current proposed crosswalk a little further up Central Avenue, Marchand pressed.
Hammer didn’t budge. And the commissioners relented, giving unanimous approval to the application while asking the university to consider adding one more raised crosswalk to Central Avenue as part of a future construction project.