Warning against airborne cigarettes, Yale has weighed in against Toad’s Place’s plans to add a smoking rooftop deck.
The university’s real estate arm, the dominant landlord in the Broadway/ York Street district, sent a letter to New Haven’s City Plan Department raising “serious concerns” about the proposal “involving public health policy and public safety.”
The letter arrived just in time for last week’s City Plan Commission meeting considering the idea. Toad’s Place wants a special zoning exception allowing it to construct a 400 square-foot wood deck atop the popular nightclub where up to 50 people could smoke and purchase soft drinks.
The commission tabled the proposal pending a city review of the impact on parking. The exception would allow Toad’s — which argues that the lounge wouldn’t increase the number of patrons at the club — to add the rooftop deck without providing more parking spaces.
It would also promote more smoking and litter the surrounding area, Yale University Properties Director Abigail Rider wrote in the letter. Yale prohibits its tenants in the district from selling tobacco or allowing smoking on their premises.
“Currently Toad’s patrons must leave their drinks and exit the premises to smoke, which at least makes it inconvenient,” Rider wrote. “Creating a smoking area inside Toad’s where patrons can carry their alcoholic beverages and smoke at the same time is clearly intended to facilitate smoking, not discourage it. Granting this variance would have the effect of directly contravening public health policy.”
She also raised the prospect of flying butts.
“It would take no effort at all to flick a cigarette butt over the fence the applicant proposes to erect on the roof, regardless of the proposed 72” height of the mesh fence,” she wrote. “A cigarette butt so launched would land either (1) on the roof of the 290 – 292 York, (2) in the cardboard-containing trash bins located in the alleyway and in the area behind 290 – 292 York known as “the Fishtank” which belongs to Yale, (3) on the heads of pedestrians in the Yale walkway that runs between Toad’s and Mory’s or on the York Street sidewalk or (4) on the back roof of Toad’s itself.”
Lawyer To Yale: “Butt Out”
“If you’re six-foot-five you can maybe flick a butt” over the fence,” responded attorney James Segaloff, who represents Toad’s in its request before City Plan and the Zoning Board of Appeals.
“Who’s going to flick these butts 20 feet in the air” and projecting them toward Yale buildings? he asked.
The rooftop lounge would in fact clear the air down on York Street, Segaloff argued: It would remove the throngs of Toad’s clients who now congregate on the sidewalk to puff away.
“Yale should butt out,” he said.
The proposal also concerns officials in charge of residential dorms on the block, such as the Hall of Graduate Studies.
Dean Jon Butler said Monday that Yale’s Graduate School is “strongly opposed” to the proposal.
“The student rooms do not have air conditioning and students necessarily open their windows for ventilation from early spring to late fall,” Butler wrote in an email message. “In addition to the problem of smoke, the noise of conversation, singing, and general good times inevitable and accepted in a fully commercial district would be destructive in a compact block where 175 graduate students live, work, study, and sleep only a few feet away — the HGS dormitory having housed graduate students for almost 80 years, or since HGS opened in 1932. This is all the more important because many graduate students continue living at HGS all summer because their laboratory and library research keeps them at Yale and in New Haven throughout the year.
“In addition, the rooftop facility would be 1/3 of a block from two Yale undergraduate colleges, Morse and Stiles, whose rooms also are not air conditioned and would be affected by the inevitable noise and activity at the Toad’s Place rooftop facility in the spring and fall.”
Frank Keil, master of Yale’s Morse College, agreed, saying his students “would have to bear the full brunt of increases in noise and other problems.” Master Steve Pitti of next-door Ezra Stiles College echoed those concerns and added a worry about “catcalls” and spilled drinks.
“You Live With It”
Reaction was mixed Monday among passersby outside the nightclub.
“It’s Toad’s. You live with it. It’s dirty either way,” said Yale undergrad Dan Klassen.
He goes to dance parties at the club, and enjoys them. He’s not a fan of smoke, he said. But what has detracted more from his experience at Toad’s, he said, is the advent of more nights geared to 19- and 21-year-olds.
History professor Paul Freedman said he likes the “anomaly” of Toad’s, a non-university business, having a spot on such a Yale-dominated stretch of town. He said he doesn’t see a “prima facie” reason to oppose the plan.
Neither did a graduate economics major (pictured) — because he just graduated. “I’m so happy I’m leaving in two weeks,” he said. He has been living at HGS, within a stone’s throw from Toad’s. He predicted the rooftop lounge will worsen the situation. “It’s already noisy as it is. It’ll be more noisy.”
Grad student and librarian Missa Northrop guessed that “drunk people up on the roof flicking cigarettes would probably be a bigger problem.” She offered a different solution: “I think it would be better if people stop smoking.”
Yale should butt out. First, public health is not Yale's concern. If Toadees are going to smoke, Yale opposition to that is not going to change it. Secondly, would Yale prefer that people leave their drinks unattended so that people can slip drugs, maybe even date rape drugs in a person's drink while they go outside to catch a smoke? Third, I don't see smokers at the Owl Shop pitching their cig or cigar butts on either the street or launching them at fellow College Street patrons. This is much ado about nothing. Have containers, service the area and put up a fence. End of story.