New Haven Independent

Posted by: write&wrong | September 24, 2008 9:01 PM

Michele, Keep up the good work...you are building relations and keeping the ball moving down the court. You are connecting the dots and making progress. I look forward to reading more about your efforts! write&wrong

Posted by: JackNH | September 25, 2008 2:10 AM

Grand Avenue is prime for this kind of thing. It's a very good idea.

Posted by: Streever | September 25, 2008 8:19 AM

That sounds really great, Whelley! Good luck. Bringing Whalley back to a profitable, pleasing neighborhood can only help our city.

We focus a lot on what we are missing out in taxes due to Yale, but imagine if Whalley, Dixwell, & the other trouble neighborhoods were productive & efficient, tax dollars wise?

Posted by: Your Tax Dollars at Work | September 25, 2008 10:18 AM

Instead of planters, benches and the usual add-on cutsey pavers, do some real planning & design. The street's too wide (used for much of the 20th century for regional automobile dealerships) Whalley, at present, great for fast moving cars but very dangerous for pedestrians and not encouraging for shoppers.

A "green" median strip connecting Edgewood Park to Broadway could change the appearance and attractiveness of the whole area. Use part of the roadway & make the sidewalks narrower. This could also be a place for bike lanes, bringing back the trolleys. and venues for food & public entertainments, sculptures, etc. Rotaries could slow and rationalize traffic. Also put in some human scale lighting and an extention of the Yale "blue light" system with security cameras.

This major planning/design opportunity could be the subject of a competition funded by the Greater New Haven Community Foundation and other New Haven based non profits. URI could fund a competition for attractive city-scape landscaping.

Posted by: anon | September 25, 2008 12:10 PM

I agree, Tax Dollars. Make it look like Barcelona instead of a strip area outside of Dayton, Ohio, and it will come back to life! It could even rival Downtown someday.

Posted by: Carole | September 25, 2008 12:37 PM

Tax Dollars,
I agree: Whalley Ave is much too wide and is designed almost exclusively for cars zooming up and down its length. A narrower, more human-oriented street is essential to making Whalley safe and inviting for drivers, merchants, shoppers, pedestrians, bicylists and other living things.

Posted by: Your Tax Dollars at Work | September 25, 2008 4:50 PM

Upper Grand (from the firehouse to I-91) could be considered for an "Arts and Home" district. Suggest: combination of street level floor covering - like Ungers - furniture dealers, designers, galleries -- might be a good new location for ArtSpace -- with artists' lofts & studios upstairs in low level (say not more than 5 story bldgs).

Here again the large local non-profits could play a meaningful role in providing relatively small seed money grants starting the ball rolling by promoting design competitions.

The City could provide imaginative leadership by focusing on neighborhoods with possibilities for small developers and increasing tax base. This could encourage small sub-contractors (e.g. carpenters, plumbers, etc) to become small developers/managers.

Posted by: anon | September 25, 2008 5:09 PM

I agree, Carole. If New Haven were nationally recognized as a more walkable, bikeable city, in the way Portland is, businesses and tax dollars would flock here.

Posted by: Josh Smith | September 27, 2008 12:28 AM

Man, do I wish Whalley had some nicer-looking storefronts. I wouldn't mind L & A Deli, etc. being there, if they just had a little bit of civic pride and spruced it up a bit! To hell with getting Starbucks and all those foofy stores to move in; let's start by getting the current merchants to take some pride in how their stores look! Your mileage may vary, but I think the way the street and storefronts look have a great impact on how safe one feels going through a neighborhood. If the stores looked more refined, rather than having homemade-looking, non-aesthetically-pleasing signs, people would be less afraid to be on that road, and they might slow down to sane speeds.

I think part of the reason people speed and run red lights on Whalley, especially at night, is because they don't want to have to stop on that stretch of the road, because they are afraid they'll get carjacked or something. And I think that all comes back to how the stores around them look. It's not entirely an issue of whether it's a liquor store or a laundromat vs. a coffee shop. Just look at Westville Wines and their nice signage further up Whalley. A lot can be done with what businesses you already have on the street to make the streetscape a nicer, more enjoyable place to be -- a place that looks great and feels safe.

A lot of people, including myself, judge how safe a neighborhood is by how it looks. If it's run-down, I assume it's a horrible place. If it's well-kept, I think it's a nice place, and I'm much more likely to visit and shop there. If the streets and stores looked nicer, people driving through might actually want to stop and shop on that stretch of lower Whalley. It seems nice-looking shops generally attract people from all walks of life, and from surrounding areas, not just the immediate neighborhood. That's how it should be. People from all walks of life should share Whalley Avenue and shop at the different stores, just like how downtown is.

Michele Whelley, I hope you read these comments. Find a way to make the above happen, and you will be at least halfway there in improving the lower Whalley corridor. Once stores look nice, nicer stores will feel comfortable moving in next door, and people will feel comfortable shopping there. Next, after the storefront facade and streetscape improvements (or even at the same time as those improvements) should be improved bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure improvements and traffic-calming measures, where the city will need to step up. Then you will have a nice, livable, walkable, shoppable(?) light commercial / residential area. This is not an easy, overnight process, but if you follow that model and keep asking yourself "Is this good for the neighborhood, in keeping with smart growth and aesthetically pleasing?", then you will definitely be victorious.

Posted by: anon | September 28, 2008 7:39 PM

C'mon. It is no secret Whalley Ave has two groups focused on econ dev on the avenue WASSD and WAR - whalley ave revit. Is that s o d a r n h a r d?

These two groups work together and have common members. They BOTH should have been invited.