As soon as next month, be prepared to find an alternate route into downtown — a $24 million project will be underway, transforming the face of the city.
As part of the newly begun Downtown Crossing project, the city plans to shut down the Oak Street Connector’s Exit 3 some time between April 15 and May 15.
That news was announced Friday morning as city, state, and federal officials gathered to break ground on the project. The event marked the official start to Phase 1 of the construction of Downtown Crossing, in which the city will begin the necessary road work.
The project is designed to undo the mistakes of half a century ago, when the city demolished hundreds of buildings and displaced hundreds of families to make way for an ill-conceived “mini-highway to nowhere.” Rt. 34 will be filled in with “boulevard streets” and mixed-use buildings, designed to “knit together” the Hill with downtown New Haven, Mayor John DeStefano said.
Downtown Crossing is expected to create 2,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent jobs, said DeStefano (pictured).
The two biggest economic engines in the city are Yale and the hospitals, DeStefano said. “This ties them together.”
Developer Carter Winstanley will build a $100 million building at 100 College St., destined to become the new home of Alexion Pharmaceuticals. The land will be conveyed to Winstanley in June. Work on the roads will continue until June 2014.
After Exit 3 is closed in April or May, Exit 2 will close in late fall. Asked if people should expect traffic delays, DeStefano said people should remember that there are lots of ways to get into New Haven. He recommended Exit 3 off of I‑91, which delivers cars to the intersection of Trumbull and Orange streets, and I‑95 Exit 45, which gets out at the Boulevard.
People have gotten used to using Rt. 34 to get into town, but it was originally intended to be a passage to the Naugatuck Valley, DeStefano said.
Quoting Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (pictured) said, “This is a big — deal.” Downtown crossing will rebuild “the guts of our city,” she said.
Gov. Dannel Malloy (pictured) saluted the project and its potential to create new jobs. “That’s what we need to do in this state,” Malloy said. “We understand the greatness that New Haven is.”
Not everyone was so enthusiastic. Elm City Cycling’s Mark Abraham said that while he’s excited about the jobs that Downtown Crossing will create, the bike advocacy organization can’t support the project. The plans are still not as bike- and pedestrian-friendly as they could be, he said. He mentioned the planned crossing at Church Street, which will be a long distance for pedestrians to cross. “I think they could have been more progressive about it,” he said.
Avoiding traffic congestion is mostly a matter of people getting used to having to around the city, rather than through it. The Boulevard to and from I-95 will have to become the primary way of getting from one side of the city to the other, while Route 34 becomes a way for people to get downtown, or for people who are already downtown to get out - similar to how the Trumbull Street, Humphrey Street and Willow Street exits function off of I-91 and how the Church Street South Extension functions off of I-95 on Long Wharf. Route 34 will no longer function as a viable cross-town route, which I think makes a lot of sense. Like any functioning city, the most efficient way across will be to go around using a Boulevard system - look at Florence, Paris, or Vienna. If we can turn the current Boulevard, which is really just an arterial highway, into a true boulevard with infrastructure for pedestrians, cycling, transit and dense mixed use buildings fronting the street, then it will be much more likely that Route 34 can develop as a true urban environment and not the hybrid highway-big parcel development it is currently being planned as.