New Haven Independent

Rae, the Yale University management and urban studies professor and former City Hall official in the administration of Mayor John Daniels, was the last of four panelists to speak on the future of the city and state at a gathering at the New Haven Museum in conjunction with an exhibition and events marking the 100th anniversary of New Haven’s city plan.

The other panelists included (left to right) Amey Marrella, from the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Karyn Gilvarg, executive director of New Haven’s City Plan Department, and Nathan Bixby, an environmental activist and head of the Network for a Sustainable New Haven.

His colleagues at last Thursday evening’s forum engaged in future-casting that contrasted bleak with positive scenarios pertaining to renewable energy, preservation of open spaces, water resources and sewer treatment. They spoke about the pollution of Long Island Sound, the apparent lack of political will to fortify central cities, the still ongoing triumph, despite recent idealistic rhetoric, of the automobile over rail, bike, port, and trail.

“God Almighty!” Rae declared, wryly. “What a lot we have to do!”

“But let’s also remember this: Many of Seymour’s visions didn’t happen either. And we have very few controls over many aspects of the world, so we should choose carefully what battles we fight.”

The Seymour Rae was referring to was this remarkable man, George Dudley Seymour (pictured here with Jennifer White-Dobbs, the museum’s director of education). Seymour’s ahead-of-his-time civic activism, love of architectural restoration, and environmentalism inspired him to spearhead Elm City’s first city plan (since the creation of the colonial Nine Squares) in 1910. That resulted in the creation of the municipal complex of the library and courthouse gracing the Green, the purchase of Fort Nathan Hale and Lighthouse Point parks for the city, the creation of playgrounds for the great influx of immigrant children (our grandparents), and much else.

“We know what we need to do, ” said Gilvarg, as she reviewed a half-dozen major regional studies. “We know what trends are occurring. We know how to achieve the positive vision. The question is: Do we have the political gumption?”

Marrella, who prior to her current state job was first selectwoman of Woodbridge, said that from the state perspective she was slightly more optimistic. “Yes, the problems are daunting. On the other hand, you make a difference just by screwing in a more efficient light bulb. Statewide, at the DEP we are beginning in earnest to think differently.” She cited the New Haven-Hartford train service improvements that appears to be chugging ahead, and the valuing of open spaces that Seymour championed being embodied now in DEP’s open space protection policies.

“However,” she added, Seymour’s charge that “piecemeal improvement is the costliest” is as true today as ever. Marrella cited the problem of a state with 169 municipalities all clinging to their individual visions, with a competition that undermines a coherent vision for the whole state and region.

Perhaps the bleakest presenter was Bixby. While extolling the richness and energy of environmental and planning talents and activists in the city, he landed, nevertheless, about a half-inch short of the apocalyptic: “New Haven is great to live in, but there is also great darkness on the horizon.”

Seymour, Bixby said, did not face in 1907 the global context that influences all local choices, and, moreover for him the sense of future was endless, whereas environmental deadlines of Damoclean proportion face today’s planners. “We are in the midst of a global die-off,” he said, “with fisheries and other resources disappearing at a rate that rivals or surpasses the great wipe-out that occurred at the time of the dinosaurs.”

In the light of that, what to do with the re-design of the Route 34 connector might seem humbling. But it is nevertheless, in Bixby’s view, a critical opportunity to “overcome fragmentation in thinking, to think way far ahead and to ask: What good will 3,000 new parking spaces be when gas hits $8 a gallon?

“Yes,” he concluded, moderating his jeremiad, “I do think the clock is ticking, but New Haven does have the stuff to be a great future-friendly city. But the goals, for example, of being carbon neutral by 2050 can’t be reached unless we take steps now and have plans in place and in implementation by 2016. That gives us one shot, ten years. I would love New Haven to be the first completely carbon-neutral city in the world, to lead the way, but that won’t happen without great leadership

Which prompted Rae’s remarks and suggestion not to despair.

“Let’s remember that Seymour began his planning predictions and his planning process” — which apparently included imagining New Haven’s growth from 100,000 to 1 million people today — “at the peak of the second great wave of immigration to America,” Rae noted. “A hundred years later we’re at the peak of the third great immigration wave. That’s one issue that has not been discussed here. However, how we handle that in New Haven will matter as much as anything else, and could be a model for elsewhere. Also, let’s not overlook the many advantages New Haven has, including the private sector resources, including Yale, which are great.”

This look back to the future of New Haven city planning was organized by this man, the museum’s energetic director William Hosley (pictured here with his wife Christine Ermenc). His presentation on George Dudley Seymour as a “prophet of place” as part of the museum’s heritage salon programs was so full of love and regard that, in the words of a number of admiring listeners, “he practically channeled the guy.”

“Seymour is my hero,” Hosley said, “I can’t get enough of the man. He addressed everything, the relationship between open spaces, architecture, art, planning, everything. His plan tried to connect the railroad to the Green, it included all kinds of amelioration in expectation of growth …and he loved our native architecture so much he got the great historic churches on the green to remove their paint so that we could enjoy the raw brick with which they were built… and as a patent attorney he even handled a machine that was a kind of prototype of a computer …and his hero was Nathan Hale and he bought and restored the Hale homestead, and then opened it for the public…Above all he believed that a knowledge of history and of a sense of place form the key foundation of citizenship.”

If nothing else, people who left the gathering, left as far better citizens. For more information on the heritage salon and other museum programs, call or email: 562-4183, extension 10; or visit this website.