Clockwise from top left: Blake; Novella; Hilton, Tower Lane plans.
Pedro Soto sees big boxes rising around town — and isn’t offended.
The big boxes are new apartment complexes and hotels built by developers lured by the city’s hot real-estate market. Some experienced New Haven development-watchers have spoken out about what they consider cheap slapped-together designs, which they believe dilutes the city’s historic architectural beauty.
As chair of the city’s Development Commission, Pedro Soto doesn’t have the same concerns. He’s an historic preservationist. He advocates for historic rehab over demolition (with an occasional exception, like the planned razing of the former Webster Bank branch at 80 Elm St.).
But history evolves, with new ideas enriching the mix, Soto argued. And in most of these cases — such as Spinnaker’s Audubon Square and Hilton Garden Inn projects, Randy Salvatore’s three Hill developments and his downtown Novella and Blake Hotel buildings — the new structures are rising on surface lots. Bringing new people, not displacing anybody. Creating new history, not destroying the old.
Thomas Breen Photo
Pedro Soto on a Development Commission tour of center-city projects.
They represent a trend in lightweight “podium” design and construction. They rely on a first-floor concrete platform, with five to six wood-frame stories atop them using different materials (such as faux-brick) as “cladding” or outer skin; and an open-bay parking area at ground level.
“Every era has their preferred inexpensive form. That’s how you get economies of scale,” Soto said during a discussion of the issue on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“These buildings are absolutely everywhere,” he noted. “I like them. I think they look kind of cool.”
Some Independent commentators have disagreed, in threads to stories like this and this.
“These buildings bear absolutely no resemblance to their surroundings other than using a little bit of brick,” commenter mspepper wrote about Paul Denz’s Corner Block and Randy Salvatore’s Tower Lane mixed-use designs. “Not one aspect of these buildings is, in any sense, traditional. They are the type of homogeneous designs meant only to be done on the cheap, with no redeeming aesthetic qualities. It’s function over form — the function being to line developer pockets as efficiently as possible. Nothing more.”
Added Estaban: “Another 5 over 1, stick built house, constructed with 2x4s under a cheap brick veneer dressing up an otherwise plastic exterior. This same building is being replicated and repeated all over the country. It’s cheap and won’t last more than 30 years. These are the slums of the future.”
City of New Haven
Drone view of collapsed wood at front left, back right, at Audubon Square construction site.
After a partial collapse last month of an upper story of Spinnaker’s under-construction Audubon Square development, Fire Chief John Alston Jr. expressed concern about the popularity of the podium design and lightweight construction in the Northeast. The lightweight steel and lightweight timber have tensile strength, but they create voids that “allow for more rapid smoke and fire travel,” he warned.
In his “Dateline New Haven” appearance, Soto also identified out-of-town slumlords as a prime housing policy challenge for the city right now and raised questions about plans to locate a new Vegas-style strip club emporium near a homeless shelter, family housing complex, and planned apartment developments.
Click on the video to watch the full episode of “Dateline New Haven” with Pedro Soto: