“Accidental” Art Comes To Parking Garages

Green, blue, tangerine, tomato red, lavender, pop out lime, and yellow. This spectrum of colors soon may be a well-recognized pattern in our town — and in that order, from bottom to top — as you ascend from level to level on all city parking garages.

That’s the long-range plan for Park New Haven​‘s (formerly monikered the New Haven Parking Authority) six garages, according to David Panagore, its executive director.

The most visible example was on display on a recent bright day as the Crown Street Garage facade (pictured above) showed off its newly hued stuff to passersby on College Street.

The paint job, in this case just of the barriers on all the levels of the north-facing facade, was begun about a year ago.

The project was not implemented as a work of art, or because the Crown Street Garage is smack dab in the midst of an entertainment district. Nor was the Crown Street Garage selected because the facility was the target of a site-specific art installation several years ago by Swiss artist Felice Varini.

It was ​“because Crown Street needed the most repairs,” said Panagore.

That work included renovating old elevators and installing new ones. ​“The cool colors came along as a consequence,” he added.

Those colors, however, were carefully chosen.

“The industry says when you put bright colors in and make garages more ​‘artsy,’ it actually improves the public safety environment. People respect the space more and treat it better,” Panagore said.

So safety may have been the first concern. But the colors please the eye. In reducing accidents, Park New Haven has also created a kind of accidental art, Panagore acknowledged.

The same color scheme has gone into the Temple Medical Garage, but the colors aren’t visible from anywhere along a public street, he said.

Park New Haven plans to continue the pattern in its other facilities and, funding permitting, have the colors not only along the barriers, but on much more surface on each level. ​“Our goal is to use the same colors,” Panagore said. ​“We want to make it simple on customers. If you’re in a New Haven garage and you’re orange, you’re on [level] three.”

Improving the parking experience through garage improvements was initially undertaken when Matthew Nemerson was helming Park New Haven before he was appointed the city’s chief economic development officer.

Panagore said that Nemerson and Mayor Harp are eager to continue these kinds of improvements as part of an ​“overall rebranding of parking in New Haven.”

The pleasing Ellsworth Kelly-ish color field installations may only be a first step. Panagore said he is interested down the road in exploring how other kinds of art might enhance a parking garage.

But that would be done with respect, especially to structures that have architectural significance. ​“We are sensitive not to take a commoner’s touch to a genius’s work of art; we wouldn’t paint Paul Rudolph’s Temple Street garage a garish purple,” Panagore said.

Park New Haven operates the Air Rights Garage, Crown Street Garage, Temple Street Garage, Temple Medical, Granite Square, Gateway Community College Garage, and, the flagship facility, the Union Station Garages. In addition to the six standing parking structures, there are 30 surface lots around town, all adding up to 8,000 spaces, Panagore said.

That’s a lot of potential new art space available. ​“Over the next years,” Panagore said, ​“we want to look at ways to create more intentional and unintentional art,” he said.

Stay tuned and — reminder to self — occasionally look up.