New Haven Independent

The plans were unveiled and the vote took place at Wednesday night’s City Plan Commission meeting.

Designs for the cancer center’s second building, a clinical lab at 55 Park St., will include a glittering four-floor-high atrium, open 24/7 through which architects say we should be able to see all the way to West Rock.There will also be a ground-level restaurant to help link the medical district with downtown.

The plans were enthusiastically received Wednesday night at the meeting. However, some commissioners and the city engineer questioned whether potentially serious additional traffic congestion at the Park Street and North and South Frontage intersections might be bad news for the city’s health.

The six-story building will be constructed on land at the western end of the Air Rights Garage and be a major passage for people who park in the garage and work in the new cancer center Yale-New Haven is constructing. People will be able to cross over South Frontage into the center via a sky bridge on the fourth floor.

The building will be clad in glass panels with ceramic dots that give a changing, patterned and mosaic effect, echoing the stone of the cancer center which it will serve across South Frontage Road. In addition to being linked by the sky bridge, 55 Park will be linked by tunnels from beneath the garage.

The chief architectural feature, an atrium, rising four floors, will be filled with light and plant life and will be the first views cancer patients have if they arrive, as many will, after parking in the Air Rights Garage.

According to Barry Svigals (bottom left in photo), one of the architects, that’s where the therapy already begins in those soaring, light, and life-filled views. But he and fellow architect Jay Brotman (in the gray shirt to the left) also expect many people to enter the atrium from street level. They said the structure could become a new happening spot in New Haven, bringing some of the 10,000 people who work in the medical district to downtown and its amenities, or at least in that direction, before they go home.

The basement will house loading docks and the hospital pharmacy. The first floor, along Park, will feature a restaurant and a fitness facility for hospital staff; the second floor an auditorium, and the third through sixth medical laboratories. There will be a spiffy pneumatic tube system through which the specimens are shot from the 55 Park building to and from the hospital.

Just as the labs are supposed to upgrade the hospital’s current ones and reduce congestion, so the loading docks are designed to relieve congestion by receiving trucks and vans from Route 34 directly without their having to go on downtown surface streets.

There’s the rub, the traffic. City Engineer Richard Miller, who otherwise applauded the design. “We have traffic failure in these corridors, and blockages, and the trucks in particular have great difficulty making turns,” he said. He suggested, ironically, that ambulances already sometimes cannot move in the rush-hour traffic of the medical district; he worried what new increased blockages might emerge.

“I just see gaps or holes in the plans submitted and in my conversations with the consultants,” he said strenuously, “and I would like to see three things: first, an additional lane on Park Street, because there’s just a sea of cars there now lining up to get on the highway; two, a turning lane from North Frontage onto Park; and third, improving the radius, or the swing turn for the large trucks that enter.”

Karyn Gilvarg (pictured at the top of this story), head of City Plan, disagreed with Miller. She pointed out that if an additional lane were added on Park, it would come at the cost of losing some sidewalk width as well as some of the proposed plantings.

“This whole project,” she said, “from the beginning has been a balancing act between the needs of pedestrians and cars. Also, the congestion on Route 34 is ultimately a state jurisdiction,” she pointed out. “And the STC [State Traffic Commission] is working on it. But we don’t want to lose the balance between pedestrian and automotive traffic.”

Mike Piscitelli, the city’s traffic czar, also called the signal system and sequencing on Route 34 “broken. So much of the hospital-based traffic,” he added, “is created by shift change, and the signals don’t harmonize yet.” However he landed on not being a traffic jeremiah like Miller. “As we move ahead, as part of the cancer center’s plan, there will be new signals and pedestrian crossings incorporated along Frontage, and we’re comfortable we can make it work, with the addition of 55 Park.”

Miller was adamant. “Cancer patients are not going to be walking but driving to the new center and to 55 Park.” He wanted his three concerns addressed. However, the architects and the owners of 55 Park, Fusco Park Street LLC, needed the site plan under review approved without these conditions so they can move ahead. The compromise? The plan was approved with the understanding that if the soon-expected State Traffic Commission studies, apprised of Miller’s concerns, ultimately recommend change, then the applicant would be back before the commission.

The architects of the building are Svigals and Partners in collaboration with Benisch Architects, Inc. of Venice, California. By arrangement with the city, the owner will not be the hospital, but Fusco Park Street LLC, the builder. By renting the first floor out to a restaurant and fitness center, and floors two to six to the hospital, Fusco will pay taxes on the building. Construction is expected to begin in April of next year and finish by the end of 2010.