The incoming mayor promised not to “drop the ball.” The outgoing mayor offered a parting slapshot to Coliseum fans who told him to “puck” off. Then pens came out, and the largest proposed downtown development project in New Haven’s history became a reality — at least in ink.
LWLP
That project is the $395 million plan advanced by a Montreal builder called LiveWorkLearn Play. The city has formally sold the company the land that used to house the New Haven Coliseum. The company promises to build a busy new-urbanist mini-city with 76,900 square feet of new shops, 785 parking spaces, 719 new apartments, a new 160-room hotel and 4.6 acres of office space. Plus a public plaza. (Click here for all the details.)
Paul Bass Photo
Developer Max Reim and Mayor John DeStefano formally signed the papers transferring the property and codifying other details of the deal at a City Hall ceremony Thursday afternoon.
The project won’t get built, though, unless the city can convince the state and federal governments to send $20 million to reconfigure Orange Street and a stretch of the Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere. (Read about that here.) That task will fall in the lap of Mayor-Elect Toni Harp. “I want to assure the public I believe in this project, and that when Mayor DeStefano and his fabulous development team headed by Kelly Murphy gives us the ball, we will not drop that ball,” Harp said at Thursday’s event.
Kelly Murphy, the city’s development chief, teared up as she noted that this is her final major public announcement after eight years in the job, shepherding major projects to approval. (She will not be staying on with the Harp administration. She and nine other mayoral appointees received letters from Harp at City Hall earlier on Thursday informing them their contracts won’t be renewed; Murphy had already announced she was pursuing new jobs elsewhere.)
“The key here is the jobs,” Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez said of the project. “Whether you are a businessperson with a PhD in economics, or you’re simply a blue-collar worker that wants to be a carpenter or … to fix leaky faucets .… The jobs are very important to us.”
Developer Reim spoke of how his company “believe[s] in your potential to be a world-class city that is known from sea to sea.”
Mayor DeStefano, meanwhile, brought a prop: Hockey pucks that opponents distributed in 2007 when the city tore down the old New Haven Coliseum, home to rock concerts, circuses, and minor-league hockey. The puck showed DeStefano’s face with a line through it.
“Do you remember where you were on Jan. 20th, 2007? I remember where I was. I was at the Temple Street Garage. It was cold. And the Coliseum exploded,” DeStefano recalled. “I started getting these little love letters. Do you remember these? ‘Mayor DeStefano, puck you.’ These were special things I got. …
“The Coliseum project was envisioned in the 1960s for a very different city of New Haven. A city that was auto-focused … using highway construction to demolish neighborhoods and create separations. … The market for what creates healthy cities had changed. What we’ve learned is cities that invest in people rather than places are cities that grow and succeed …”
DeStefano said the proposed new project “reflects a vision of the city that the market drives and a real competitiveness and authenticity that is New Haven today. It is not a vision looking backward. It is a vision looking forward. It is one that relies on a city where people live, where they walk and bike to work, where workplaces are proximate to where they live.”
And he offered these parting words:
“To those of you who sent me these, you know where you can put them.”
Good to see development that may happen, but it's a shame we're still designing pedestrian and cycling infrastructure like it is the 1960s. For all the nice talk about "complete streets", the reality is that the streets around this area will still be hostile to people who take wheelchairs and walk. This was a major opportunity to fix the city for everyone, not just the planners, Mayors, and suburbanites who drive everywhere. We are losing that. When will our aging leaders catch up with the economic reality of the past 20 years?