New Haven Independent

That’s right, inside the block.

Yale has remade the inside of block, transforming a sprawling surface parking lot into an oasis of “new urbanism.” Walk along with Hayden to share her insights about suburban sprawl and urban anti-sprawl, on display side by side behind Mamoun’s and Pizza House at Howe Street and Edgewood Avenue. See how planners can pave over community — or rebuild it.

Hayden’s stroll began from her office in temporary quarters of Yale’s architecture school. Hayden teaches there. Her office is on the ground floor of a new four-story parking garage on Howe Street.

Until last year the area was one sprawling surface lot for Yale; nothing but cars and locked gates. Now three new buildings with “green” bonafides have arisen on that lot, as well as walkways. (Kieran Timberlake Associates were the architects.) One of those buildings is the garage, which, unlike garages built in New Haven’s “New Brutalist” nightmare of the ’50s and ’60s (think: Temple Street Garage), has panels on the outside and first-floor activity that connects to the street: storefronts (one of which has a Yale security station) as well as the office in which Hayden works. (Hayden and her colleagues are working there while the architecture building at York and Chapel undergoes repairs.)

Rather than exiting onto Howe Street, Hayden walked through a door connecting her garage-topped office suite to Yale’s new four-story, 55,100-square foot School of Art Sculpture Building, filled with studios, classrooms and offices. It sits in the middle of the block, atop where some of the asphalt parking lot used to be.

That building, in turn, lets out onto a new mid-block plaza — a walkway connecting Park Street to the middle of Howe Street where Mamoun’s sells felafel and, down the block, Miya’s sells sushi. People actually walk on this block again…

… as well as bike, as Hayden noted with pleasure. Hayden called the design of the interior block “a suggestion that pedestrian activity is wanted here.” The sprawling former Lot 80 parking lot consumed most of the block in order to park 186 cars. The new interior block confines cars to the garage, which holds 288 cars; the block’s new buildings were kept to the same heights as existing surrounding buildings in the neighborhood.

Hayden was pleased because she has a clear preference for urban spaces that welcome strollers and pedestrians rather than cars. In fact, that’s part of a professional career. She writes books and lectures about the devastating effects of sprawl, of building over nature and paving over greenfields as well as city spaces to make way for cars, and more cars. Hayden wrote a celebrated book about the subject, A Field Guide to Sprawl (2004). It includes aerial photos of monstrous post-war planning geared to automobiles and trucks, including the “Asphalt Nation” shot at the top of this photo.

Right now those photos and Hayden’s witty, information write-ups are on display at a new gallery at Yale. That’s the building pictured above. The one-story, 3,100-square-foot building, too, rose from the asphalt parking lot. It extends from the center of the block out to the sidewalk on Edgewood Avenue. It even has a green roof (vegetation that makes the building more energy-efficient).

Hayden likes the way that the building’s glass first-floor walls “invite” neighbors into the gallery, which is open (and free to the public) 9-5 on weekdays, 10-5 on Saturdays.

To walk inside the gallery is to walk out of a new urbanist stage set and into a sprawl horror movie. The photos on display include this one of “Ball Pork.” Hayden describes the term: “Ball pork combines ballpark and pork-barrel — a government project or appropriation with rich patronage benefits) to describe a stadium built with public funds for the use of a privately owned ball team. In many U.S. cities, taxpayers struggle with ball pork. The Denver Broncos play in Invesco Field, a facility supported by a six-county sales tax hike. Opponents of ball pork suggest that handouts to privately-owned teams worsen sprawl by monopolizing funds that could be used to meet more basic needs such as public transit, child care, and schools.”

It didn’t appear to be planned this way, but Hayden’s exhibit turns out to be a fitting inaugural for the new gallery, which is part of a block that she calls one “answer” to the sprawl she documents. On the other hand, placing the exhibit at a truck stop would have been fitting, too, Hayden argued — fitting for a different reason. Click on the play arrow to watch her talk about that as she roamed her exhibit.

Hayden left the building from the back, onto the inner-block walkway. To her right was the parking garage atop her office. She parks there — that’s right, for all her antipathy toward car culture, she finds she needs to drive to work from her home in Guilford. She’d prefer to take the train, she said, but Shoreline East’s schedules are too rigidly geared to 9-to-5 schedules. You can’t train into town in the afternoon; her daughter, a Yale student, can’t catch a train in the morning out to Guilford to borrow the car.

“It’s wonderful to see the bikes and people walking by,” she said. “In the real world, can you remove the cars? If there were better public transportation.” Otherwise, people get locked into car-commuting routines. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living in a suburb, or a city,” Hayden said. The issue for her is planning — and government subsidy of builders paving over nature, and draining resources from the preservation of older cities and towns. “We shouldn’t be giving subsidies to private developers without public benefit or planning. The public gets nothing out of this except to hear there’s no money for day care centers or to fix sidewalks or public schools.”