New Haven Independent

2 Howe Street, formerly known as the Lot E site, and the garage that will be supporting Yale-New Haven Hospital’s rising Smilow Cancer Center, glided through to unanimous approval of its site plan by the City Plan Commission Wednesday night

The aldermanic representative on the commission, Roland Lemar, captured the not-with-a-bang-but-certainly-not-with-a-whimper mood of the vote when he said, “Look, no one’s excited about putting a parking garage in the middle of Route 34, but it’s a pretty good collaboration between the developer, city, and the hospital.”

The $34 million 845-space garage is a mixed-use development that will rise on the block between Dwight and Howe and Legion and North Frontage. If all goes well, construction will begin in September of this year with the ribbon cut months later, in February 2010.

The third of three sites in the cancer center agreement (the center itself and the Park Street medical lab building are the other two), the garage will be “wrapped” by 24 units of townhouses for patients and families on North Frontage, and an office building and stores the length of Howe (a schematic of these is in the picture at the top). Legion will be all garage, as will Dwight, although both those facades will be have ficus-climbing screens, and a “parklet” on Dwight to conceal the garage.

Developer Will Smith and his Intercontinental Development of Boston said they were proud of their design in its balance between vehicle and pedestrian requirements. There’s a stop and build-out on Howe for the hospital’s 24-hour van service and bicycle racks for the residential units, and sidewalks, to be built, on all four surrounding blocks. Also, Smith said, the main entryways to the garage, on Dwight, will feature pedestrian friendly bollards marking the approaches.

He also was pleased with the architecture, particularly the solar panels and green features of the garage (click here for a previous story and reader discussion) and the way the residential units mirror those across North Frontage Road. The rentals are not for the community at large but restricted for hospital uses

David Alvarado, executive director of Hill Development Corporation, applauded the plan. The one dissenting voice in the chamber was that of long-time architectural watchdog Anstress Farwell (pictured at the top of this story) of the Urban Design League. She disputed Smith’s assertion that the structure speaks the “vocabulary” of any of the surrounding buildings.

Farwell bemoaned missed opportunities to revive the Hill, to make the whole block more foot-friendly by turning Dwight and Howe into two-way streets, and to create a building that could function as a real gateway to the city. “No serious architectural review has been done on this project.”

Much of the pre-vote discussion by commissioners focused on questions of traffic raised by Farwell and others previously at two community meetings, which were mandated by the cancer center development agreement. Smith told the commissioners, as he did the community, that it was not within his power to mess with the direction of Howe or Dwight, or with conditions on North Frontage, which here is a state road.

The next stop for Intercontinental is indeed the State Traffic Commission in Hartford. The commission, comprised of three commissioners — from the departments of Transportation, Public Safety, and Environmental Protection — are generally known to neither approve nor reject outright, but to tweak plans.

With City Plan’s approval, Intercontinental can now sign its formal agreement with the hospital, money will flow, and the developer’s traffic planners will prepare in earnest for the commission’s approval. If they do receive it — and there may be some delay as state’s agenda is to move traffic, which is not the same as the garage’s agenda — then the developers can obtain city building permits, and shovels go into the ground in the fall.

“In our planning and projections for the garage,” said Smith’s traffic consultant, Joseph Balskus of Tighe & Bond, “we’re relying on the $1 million re-signalization of North Frontage, and other changes in the area that are planned. Even with the 2 Howe St. garage, we project that the traffic in the immediate area will get no worse,” he assured one concerned citizen, “and it might even get better.”

Let’s hope he wasn’t being ironic.