DEAN SAKAMOTO ARCHITECTS
Design for the planned new canal tunnel.
A year after a breakthrough in negotiations with abutting property owners, the city is wrapping up legal loose ends on plans to construct the last leg of the Farmington Canal Trail in New Haven.
Pending sign-offs on some uncontroversial legal papers, the city hopes to put the work out to bid this summer and have construction begin in the fall, said City Plan Director Mike Piscitelli.
The Board of Alders has already signed off on easements with owners of nine properties along the route where the city plans to continue converting the former rail line into a walking and biking path, which currently ends at Temple Street. The plan would extend the path another two miles through Wooster Square to the Long Wharf pier.
The key remaining document is a lease subordination with People’s Bank for the Audubon-Grove parking garage owned by Konover Commercial Corporation. The extended path would pass beneath it.
By January 2017 Piscitelli’s predecessor, Karyn Gilvarg, had completed four years of heavy lifting in completing deals with all the abutting property owners. Originally she’d hoped to have construction begin last fall. (Read a full story about that here.)
Some design changes have also contributed to delays, as have discussions with the state and city over whether the state can pay for some of the work in the area where the extended trail would cross from Olive Street past Water Street. There it would dovetail with improvements the Department of Transportation is making at Union Station and the surrounding railyards.
“It’s been cooperative; it takes time,” Piscitelli said of working through the legal documents. “There’s nothing out there to suggest anyone has intentionally lagged.
Canal stairs to Audubdon arts park.
“These are long-term relationships. This greenway is going to be in place a long time. It’s important that we get them accurate plans and drawings.”
In the 1990s, a civic association formed to advocate converting the entire 84-mile canal, from New Haven to Northampton, Mass., into a paved trail for hikers and cyclists. So far about half of the trail has come to fruition, including a 12-foot-wide paved stretch with stone columns at street crossings from the Hamden border to Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven that opened in segments between 2002 and 2010.
Accumulating the segments in a city is complicated and takes years. It took three phases to get that part of the city’s stretch of the trail built.
This final fourth phase would complete the trail from Hillhouse to Canal Dock Road on Long Wharf. The plan is to convert the tunnel under Whitney Avenue into a lit space with an exhibit about the canal’s history. It would also include gates so it can be closed off overnight.
The trail will continue running below ground until a half block past Whitney Avenue. It can’t continue underground there because it would proceed beneath the FBI building, which the federal government won’t allow for fear of bombings. So the trail will run up a slope by the Audubon garage to Grove Street, by Sitar Indian restaurant at the corner of Orange.
After that, the trail would continue on Grove over to Olive Street — then on Water Street, to Brewery Street, over to Long Wharf Drive. The state Department of Transportation has begun creating some of that trail as part of concessions it made to New Haven for the I‑95 widening project.
The Whitney Gateway.
First of all, kudos to the advocates and city staff for their efforts. But I do wonder whether the funding authorized years ago for the final phase will be sufficient to complete it.