nothin Fed $20M Will Help Reconnect City’s Center | New Haven Independent

Fed $20M Will Help Reconnect City’s Center

City of New Haven

The original grant vision.

The federal government is sending New Haven $20 million to help stitch downtown’s Temple Street back together with the Hill neighborhood and make fallow land available for new development.

The city’s Congressional delegation announced Friday that the $20 million will arrive in the form of a U.S. Department of Transportation TIGER VIII” grant for Phase III of the Downtown Crossing project.

The city had asked for $40 million. Officials said they’re ecstatic to get the $20 million; the grant process was highly competitive.

We’re very, very excited. … This brings the Hill into downtown,” said city economic development chief Matthew Nemerson. He credited his deputy, Mike Piscitelli, City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg, and City Plan project manager Donna Hall for doing amazing work” on the application.

In a conference call Friday, officials said the $20 million grant will enable them to regrade the dip at MLK Boulevard at the end of Temple Street and prepare the area for more development. An immediate development target is 101 College St., the lot across from the new 13-story Alexion office story. 101 College backs onto the land where Temple Street could theoretically be extended.

The money may also enable the city to put a pedestrian path across the old Route 34 Connector land over to a promised new development at Washington Avenue’s northern terminus. But, with only half the money they sought, officials need to redesign the plan with, at least for now, no new road for cars to drive from Temple.

Officials plan to come up with a new set of plans to show the feds for how to spend the $20 million. The plan may eventually, according to Nemerson and Piscitelli, include a request for more money to build a bridge or fill in the land for cars to travel across from Temple to Washington. Especially if a new development project emerges at 101 College.

Three-Stage Crossing

Downtown Crossing is an ongoing effort to replace the old Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere with revived through streets between downtown and the Hill. The goal is to recreate a neighborhood feel, where people can walk and bike safely and developers can put up new offices or stores. To recreate community where a mini-highway once destroyed it.

For too long, New Haven has endured a misguided, man-made highway to nowhere that has isolated neighborhoods and stifled development. With this grant — the second TIGER grant for Downtown Crossing — New Haven can continue to show what is possible when a city takes bold steps to transform its economic future,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal stated in a release.

An earlier $16 million TIGER grant helped make Downtown Crossing’s Phase I happen. It connected College Street with Congress Avenue next to where Alexion Pharmaceuticals has since built a 13-story headquarters

Phase II involved reconnecting Orange Street with South Orange Street near where a Montreal developer is theoreticallly going to build a $400 million new-urbanist community on the site of the former New Haven Coliseum.

The new TIGER grants gets the city started on Phase III, the street in the middle: Temple.

Which is also, according to Nemerson, the most complicated of the three crossings.”

It’s a complicated project,” he said, because the elevations are very different.”

On one side, Temple Street ends at MLK Boulevard, swinging right at the bottom of an embankment in front of the Temple Street Garage.

At the other end, Washington and Congress Avenues currently converge at a higher elevation and swing over to Church Street.

The project will ideally promote the flow of people to the new apartments, stores, offices and research space that developer Randy Salvatore plans to build on 20 acres of largely fallow land in and around Washington, Congress, Prince, and Church. That plan appeared dead last month because of a legislation roadblock at the Board of Alders. But the word now is that a deal has been reached to revive the plan, with approval expected next week.

Neighborhood, Redux

Click here to read the city’s application for the TIGER grant. It details how New Haven would have spent the full $40 million. The request envisioned a $73.35 million total project cost for Phases II and III of Downtown Crossing. (The state and city have already committed $33.5 million for Phase II by the old Coliseum site.)

The application also offers historical background on how the city wiped out a neighborhood during mid-woth century urban renewal to build the ill-fated 1.1‑mile partial Route 34 Connector:

The Oak Street Connector (Route 34), built in 1959, was the first major piece of an urban renewal plan that was never fully realized and resulted in the destruction of one of New Haven’s most distinct communities. The Oak Street neighborhood was one of the densest, most vibrant and poorest neighborhoods in New Haven; a diverse and thriving community of African American, Italian, Irish and Jewish families reminiscent of New York’s Lower East Side. Its removal for a new highway speaks of an era when automobile mobility was prioritized over neighborhood cohesion. As opposed to looking for ways to improve living conditions in this largely immigrant community, the area was instead cleared out to make way for this 1.1 mile extension, relocating 881 households and clearing 350 businesses to construct a connection from interstate’s I‑91 and I‑95. A plan to extend this spur even further west was never realized (plans were officially abandoned in the 1970’s) and this suddenly isolated community began a long slow economic decline. The communities, especially those that were isolated to the south of the new connector have never fully recovered.

Today, the Route 34 Corridor presents an intimidating physical and visual barrier isolating downtown and the Yale Central Campus from Union Station, the Hill neighborhood and the Medical District. This once dense and organized network of blocks that made up a cohesive community has been replaced by mishmash of large footprint developments, acres of parking lots, a few residential towers, a housing project, and some single story office buildings that largely turn their backs to the street network.”

Long term, the idea is to recreate that sense of a neighborhood on the land and connect it to the neighborhoods at both ends.

In recent years, as officials have rolled out versions of the Downtown Crossing plan, some advocates have called for less of an emphasis on cars and more on bikes and pedestrians. (Officials argue they’ve incorporated all three modes.) With only $20 million, the city oculd proceed with bridging the Hill and Temple Street with just cars and bikes, but no cars.

Anstress Farwell of the Urban Design League, who has criticized some of the plans (including the Salvatore plan) for being too car-focused, said she does support the idea of eventually building a road to connect Temple with Washington, especially for buses to use, maybe even a streetcar.”

She was taken aback by seeing, for the first time, the drawings continued in the city’s application for the Tiger money. Including the drawing at the top of this story.

Farwell said she was disappointed to see megastructures on parking platforms” filling surface lots. This is completely different from any conception” shown earlier to the public, she said. I don’t know why they took St. Anthony’s Church off and replaced it with parking. … Within this document itself, there’s no consistent vision of the street network.”

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