Fire Paved Way For A New Coogan

I like the idea of this, but $300k is a LOT of money. Couldn't that be better used running programs to keep kids out of trouble?

I don't see how it's going to get used more in the future than it does now. There's no budget for hiring staff or making programming and I don't see why the new building will get less neglect than the old one.

How about tearing it down, turning it back into grass, and the few weeks in the summer it would get used for the day camp, they put up a tent.

This is a gorgeous design. Who would be against it? EXCEPT, what can we build for $237,000 -- the amount provided by fire insurance? Our debt service in New Haven is too high.

Although its great Edgewood Park is getting some much needed attention, I have to chuckle at this statement, "The plan is to "glaze it everywhere." The two main walls of the central A-frame portion would be almost entirely made of glass, allowing people, including police officers, to look right through the building at all hours."

I have lived on the park for over a decade and I can tell you beyond police sitting in the park eating lunch in their cruisers or talking with other officers in cars parked next to them, I have never seen a police officer patrolling this park. They should be but they do not.

In a way it saddens me that the city is spending precious budget dollars above the insurance money to rebuild this place when it will, ultimately, sit empty and be difficult, at best, to use given this city's bureaucracy in gaining access to public spaces. This park doesn't even so much as have a ranger ever walking around it. How does the city plan on opening this building up to the public with ease? It was certainly never easy to use the old pavilion. What will change?

Honestly, they should use the insurance money to tear it down and add to the skate park.

@Curious, 300K is bunch, but I know they are trying everything they can to keep costs down. For ex: Mr. MacMullen redirected the solar panels from a bank of them the city had already. What the city gets from that 300K should be decent value for money. I'm excited about the physical Coogan.

While an improved building helps, an empty Coogan doesn't help us as much as it could as if it were in use. An occupied Coogan would improve general safety, utilization of the park, encouragement of foot/bike traffic from end-to-end, etc.

There are many people and orgs willing to help Parks and Rec achieve wall-to-wall programming to keep the building in use full time.

There is a virtual green belt from West River through Edgewood over toward West Rock, wrapping around to Beaver Hills. We should do what we can to treat that as a path for travel vs a set of disjointed islands.

To get back to your point Curious, we need spaces to run youth programs. I hope that the city re-evaluates the use of public spaces (parks, schools, etc) to leverage them better in the near future.

Ward 25 is the wealthiest in the city and deserves its fair share of community centers, but what about the many neighborhoods in our city that still have no sidewalks?

CURIOUS,

I'm familiar with current construction prices and $300K to revamp the building sounds appropriate. Programs (especially park related summer programs) need spaces and since a reworkable shell is in the park, its sounds like a wise expenditure.

@Robn, it's not $300,000, it's $537,000. $237,000 from fire insurance, plus $300,000 budgeted in city's capital funds.

If the police never go there and it's going to be made out of glass, will the city at least install some video cameras so they can track down whoever smashes all the windows out?

This would be a good project for a Boy Scout Troop. Build a nice, economical, wooden pavilion for the community to use. The city should not be funding a building that will go mostly unused or neglected. Oh wait, they already do that, they're called schools.

"Ward 25 is wealthy" has found this thread. Anyone who wants to torpedo the chance at a real community center, that's the cheapest weapon to wield. I'd like to try to re-orient the Coogan for this discussion, and place the building in the center of its true community.

The neighborhoods that use Edgewood Park come from a much bigger catchment area than one ward. It's obvious to those that spend time in the park. Ask the families that use the playground near Ella Grasso where they live. Ask the dog walkers. Ask the kids in the skate park. Ask the tennis and hoop players. Ask the adults who book the soccer field. For those keeping score at home, no fewer than six wards are in my unscientific sample, from all income levels, age groups, etc.

Edgewood Park is a span that connects a lot of people, creating a community on a large scale. Anything that improves traffic flow from the playground and the duck pond into the Village, and vice-versa, is great news. Anything that fails to do that, contributes to a park that resembles a no-man's land or a natural boundary to keep neighborhoods from mingling. Thanks to a great population, we are pretty far away from that situation, but it is a possibility.

I have some sympathy for the view that Coogan could just as well be razed as built up - for me that hinges on use and the gravitational pull of the building based on activities in the building.

To those who rightly say money is precious, and the threat of neglect/disuse puts that money into question - there are groups inquiring with money of their own that could keep Coogan busy. There may be existing city programs too that could also book time. It is possible to keep programming going and respect the idea that no one group can move in and crowd us all out.

If the Parks Dept can remain open to ideas for programming, hours of operation, and the process for booking time, the money will be well spent, and spent on behalf of a large swath of the city.

$300k really is not a lot of money to refurnish an entire house sized structure, they're not building a gazebo out of plywood. It's not like they're just putting a few new roof beams up, and on top of it the building actually has to be furnished when its done as well. I think more people will use it now, if for anything just because of the new architecture. Warm buildings with lots of light that are easily seen into are far more inviting to people right off the bat.

It looks like someone tried to engage the community on this a while back, in February.

https://www.facebook.com/westvillect/posts/160438990772664

Were any of the community's desires or concerns taken into account? Or is the same old thing that was built 40 years ago being remade? This seems like a great opportunity to improve what was there.

Again, it's neat if the city has this, but that's an awful lot of money to spend on a place that won't be open all the time, or staffed.

@Curious,

To answer your question directly, Parks moved very quickly on the solution - therefore the input didn't precede the design.

What was gathered was brought to Parks to see how that data lined up with the plan. It appears that the physical building can facilitate, or will provide the basis for satisfying over time, a great number of those priorities and activities volunteered in the survey, if the building can be put to wide use.

The physical improvements do solve some of its historical barriers for proper use: efficient heating and cooling goes a long way to keeping the building in use, constantly or sporadically. Winter was a no-go in the recent past. The layout lends itself to multiple activities by small groups at once, etc. (It is fair to assume that during the summer camp period Coogan is single use though.)

I'm not speaking for anyone, but it seems to boil down to what we've arrived at here: great architectural project, nothing off the mark, could be a useful space. Now, how will it be used, by whom, and how can we pre-load the schedule during the year of construction.

The comment about the pavilion only being used a limited amount of time was from the now FORMER head of parks and rec. He no longer has a say in how the space is used. Bob Levine was good at a lot of things but he always, in my experience, greeted any request to do something new or different with "No. We can't." Often we just went around him and did it anyway or went over his head. In EVERY instance it got done and the only problem was him. (I could tell you stories!!!)

Hopefully the new chief of Parks will have some vision and a willingness to work closer with the community of volunteers ever ready to step in and make good use of our resources.

Mike Slattery,

I think if you lived in one of the neighborhoods in the Coogan "catchment area," but didn't even have a sidewalk to walk on, or you did have a sidewalk but no trees to walk underneath in the peak of the summer, then you might have a different sense of priorities for the city's limited capital funds.

I agree that potential users of Coogan should have some say in what gets built (that's politics), but they should also be thinking about conditions in other neighborhoods. I'm guessing that a lot of the people at the table are from Westville, and don't spend much time walking around the Hill.

What investment will have a greater impact on the city's economy and environment in the long term - $500K worth of new trees or sidewalks in the neighborhoods that don't have them, or a $500K community center?

Both improved parks because of an active community center as well as improved sidewalks with more trees are both good investments for the city!

Agree, Madcap. A commuter tax on city employees who don't live here would cover much of the cost of those things.

"The fire that lit up Coogan Pavilion last fall may yet have a good outcome: Edgewood Park could soon be lit up by a glowing, glass-fronted, solar-powered community center."

Ironically it was a three alarm "glowing" fire in March of 1962 that destroyed a large business complex on West Rock Avenue that gave birth to the original Coogan Pavilion. The destroyed building was located on the borderline of Edgewood Park.

@Edward Francis, that is cool.

@anon, my argument is that the potential users do come from other neighborhoods. So far, this thinking deserves "airquotes" but isn't thoughtful enough to counter your pivot that introduced a zero-sum game, and an opponent I wasn't aware I had. Sparring with an anon dishing identity politics is hardmode, for sure.

If I'm forced to choose between an air-conditioned place in a park that children might spend a bunch of time around, or some miles of tree-lined streets for our tax dollars, that is hard. Especially if some people come to the park to escape hot sidewalks and dangerous intersections, some of which can be alleviated by street trees. My family is as committed to Edgewood Park as it is to URI and street trees. I hadn't thought of them as anything but complimentary before, so this is an interesting exercise.

I grew up in a place where lack of shade made the walk/bus/bike to our Rec Center or the Public Library an absolute priority. There was nothing fancy at the Rec, just reasonable temperatures, water, and teenaged help to keep things from getting out of hand. I think about that every time I see the Coogan or the Mitchell closed. I know what a huge difference any kind of shelter and order makes in a kid's free time, and a parent's peace of mind.

If a person spends time in the park and feels that my assessment of the area served (Amity, West Rock, Beaver Hills, Edgewood and Westville at least) is wrong, OK there's something to talk about. If more than one person in Westville liking Coogan gives one the vapors, there's not much to talk about. I'll point toward the B of A and New Haven Rising for evidence that people from neighborhoods with varying tree belts want space for youth activities. I'd trust the Coogan's fate to any decent model of utility, pass or fail. I would not like to see the potential for a real community center fall victim to some manufactured intramural beef, so let's not do that.

This looks beautiful- would people be able to rent it for parties, showers, and small weddings? That could raise money for the city and draw more people to use the park. What an asset this new building will be to the neighborhood!

The suggestion to renovate the armory was ridiculous political grandstanding that would cost tens of millions to accomplish. It was foolish and I was all over the recently elected union coalition about this political grandstanding.

Improving Coogan Pavilion, however, seems like a good investment. It was basically a storage shed and spending a modest $300K over the insurance reimbursement seems reasonable to preserve and improve this asset. (PS I don't use this park or this pavilion..I just think its a good investment for our city.)

I think the point I want to make, and which others have since made and done a better job of making, is that Edgewood Park is lovely and having a nice pavilion is wonderful, but spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to spruce up a beautiful park when some neighborhoods are just concrete and asphalt seems a questionable priority to me.

I like teachermama's idea of allowing this new pavilion to be a venue that can be rented out for private events, much like the carousel at Lighthouse Point is able to be used for weddings and such. That revenue could go towards paying back the $237,000 from the general fund that builds the new pavilion, and after that is paid off, the revenue can go into the coffers of the Parks Department.

Best of luck to the locals on getting the city to let them use this resource!