Allan Appel Photo
Ennever Reid helped reimagine her neighborhood Wednesday night.
A big grocery at Lafayette Street, not a mom-and-pop. A high-rise with water views for the transit-oriented yuppies. A public plaza to attract train travelers; behind it, a gated green space. Roofttop gardens. Underground parking. Buildings no more than four to six stories high.
No matter how it turns out, make sure we can afford to still live there. And, in capital letters, keep it SAFE.
Those ideas — and anxieties — emerged not from government planners but from people who live at the federally subsidized Church Street South housing complex across from the train station.
They offered their ideas Wednesday meeting at the most recent meeting to solicit public input as the city develops guidelines for the revitalized Hill-to-Downtown development district that it hopes will emerge in the next five to ten years.
About 40 people, with neighbors outnumbering consultants and city officials two to one, gathered at the Hill Central School on Dewitt Street.
Their challenge: to offer their design ideas specifically for a reimagined Church Street South complex. For years planners have wanted to dismantle and rebuild the troubled 301-unit development, arguably the hub of the development wheel for a new configuration whose aim is to link Union Station with the medical district and downtown. (Click here for a story about last month’s “placemaking” workshop on the same project. Click here for a tour of the imagined new area with city development officials Kelly Murphy and Erik Johnson.)
Trowbridge Square’s Barbara Montalvo (left) suggested Portsea St. could cross to the new Church St. South. Helen Martin-Dawson said that would create more traffic and trouble.
City-hired consultants from Boston-based Goody Clancy asked participants Wednesday night to “have fun, be kids,” but in the process come up with design ideas for residences, parks, other open space, and any other “values” they’d like to see in the new Church Street South.
Entryway to Church Street South today viewed from the east.
Poring over maps of the area strewn across seven tables in the school’s cafeteria, participants came up with at least one recurrent theme: security and safety.
Church Street South residents Jissette Chona and Maritza Vargas said said a new openness to the train station would increase their anxiety about the safety of their children. Hill South Alderwoman Dolores Colon said that anxiety extended to fears that some traveler drawn to a retail and visitor-friendly new plaza, for example, also might easily abduct their kids.
They therefore suggested any public plaza with retail or amenities attracting train-bound visitors also have a wall setting it apart from the more private world of a new Church Street South, where green spaces with water features for kids, a laundromat, day care center, gym, and other amenities might be private.
Vargas even suggested the entry be gated.
Sharmaine Kinsey (pictured) has been living at Church Street for only a month. She already had some strong ideas: that in the new buildings to come, people of different incomes and ages be mixed, and not be clustered separately. She also felt said Columbus Avenue be extended so that retail could be on the street and the school bus be able turn into it and deliver her kid more safely from school.
To Gate or Not to Gate?
Carlisle Street resident Monique Caesar agreed with Kinsey and upped the ante as it were against Jissette Chona and Martiza Vargas. “[In our design] we opened up Church Street South and Columbus to being pedestrian friendly, with ground level retail, neighbors friendly, not a gated community,” but one whose streets integrate, she said.
Speaking through a translator, Liveable City Initiative Hill South specialist Chris Soto, Judith Hernandez (pictured) described what she wanted: “A place where we’re not considered second-class citizens and guaranteed that after fighting so hard we can come back” to a rebuilt development.
Her remarks elicited spontaneous applause.
Goody Clancy’s Reese Fayde asked Hernandez how that feeling might be achieved or translated into a design suggestion.
Hernandez replied: “To feel you’re facing front, not living in back of a building.”
Could the corner of Union and Church Street South be the site of a new high rise with water views?
City economic development chief Kelly Murphy said she was pleased with the turnout and the candor of the comments.
Her big takeaway: “People want to make sure that conditions they talked about [lack of safety] are not replicated in what we do next.”
She emphasized that the city owns almost none of the 10.8 acre site, and any development will be largely private. [Officials have struggled fo ryears to move a plan along with the government-subsidized owner of the complex, Northland.) Wednesday’s exercise is part of a public planning process that will add citizen input into government’s thinking about how to redo the whole area from the train station to Yale’s medical school, “so [future developers] know what we want,” Murphy said.
Goody Clancy’s David Spillane said the city’s general plan-in-progress for Church Street South envisions doubling the density from the current 301 units to somewhere between 650 and 750, mostly in mid-rise, or four-to-six-story buildings.
Next step: Consultants and officials take the suggestions made and incorporate them into a series of master plan options. Those options will then be presented for more public comment at the next gathering on June 25.