Architects, Engineers Reimagine The Train Station

Union Station’s entrance, normally snarled with personal vehicles and taxis, could become an open plaza with fountains and café seating, across Union Avenue from a demolished or rebuilt Church Street South housing complex.

That vision emerged at a ​“charette,” or brainstorming design session, about how to improve the train station, New Haven’s gateway to much of the outside world.

Participants envisioned car traffic minimized by lower speed limits, and taxis lining up behind the station rather than out on the street.

As they dreamed up a new vision at the session, which took place Friday, engineers and architects invoked the names of early 20th century urban planners Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Cass Gilbert, and the comprehensive plan they drew up in 1910 for the city, which would have connected the station with downtown. (Click here for a story on that plan.) They spoke of restoring he grandeur that Olmstead and Gilbert had envisioned for the city.

David Panagore, executive director of Park New Haven (pictured), said Friday’s workshop was a visioning process, including ideas New Haven might want to pursue before the state builds a promised second parking garage.

“We’re not headed from here to construction,” he said. ​“It is important to start feeding ideas now.”

Divided into three teams, the architects and engineers were tasked with ways to better organize Union Avenue, enhance the visitor experience to the station, and promote transit, walking and cycling.

Architect Howard Hebel of Newman Architects (pictured) and his group tackled the design of Union Avenue and providing ​“elbow room” for all the current forms of transit at the train station as well as increased numbers of people walking and biking to the station. Their plan called for keeping the drop/off and arrivals out front and having the taxi line at a different end of the station. Instead of valet parking out front, they would relegate it to one of the parking garages. A potential traffic-calming idea would be to create an island much like the one in the Broadway district for Union Avenue. The group envisioned the front of the station connecting to the future Union Square envisioned for the Hill-to-Downtown project.

Before tackling the visitor’s experience outside Union Station, architect Patrick Pinnell’s group could not resist addressing the inside, which he described a ​“big space that is not coherent.” The group would start with an information kiosk with a person inside to help people get their bearings and information.

His group also would change the signage in a way that gives people more information about buses and taxis so that people just didn’t spill out the front of the station. He pointed out that the signage is so banal that a first-time visitor could mistake the Subway restaurant for an actual entry point to a subway station that would take them to the Green — an observation that drew several chuckles.

Pinnell, who is a member of the Cass Gilbert Society, said he’d look more closely at Gilbert’s original plans for the train station to see if they might still be applicable for restoring the grandeur of the historic building and its surroundings.

Architect Robert Orr (pictured) and his group took their cues from train stations in Baltimore and a proposed station in Sarasota, Florida, in designing the front of Union Station as a more pedestrian-friendly plaza. The design would move the taxi stand to the back of the station where some existing employee parking will soon move.

The plan would also call for allowing people the chance to walk safely through Church Street South, the site of among the highest street-crime rates in the city. The group envisioned row houses and fountains, and a Union Avenue that no longer runs straight between the the station and Church Street South, but curves around both structures to connect to other streets.

Middletown Architect Catherine Johnson (pictured) took her cues from train stations in Europe, sketching a slightly enclosed plaza that stretches across Union Avenue. She said it would be ​“a place more filled with people,” not as visually focused on cars and taxis, though there would be points of entry that would accommodate people using those modes of transportation to get to the station.

New York-based architect Michael King said Johnson’s design ​“created something that you would actually want to take someone to see,” he said. ​“The idea is that we can see the space in front of the building as an urban room … It’s something that you can be proud of.”

Park New Haven’s Panagore said the goal of the workshop was to come up with some ideas that will allow the city to have some local influence over what happens to Union Station in the future. The ideas will be pulled together in a document that the city can use as city officials provide input to the state.

“We’re not saying this is the be all end all,” he said. ​“But we wanted to get people thinking about more than just picking up and dropping off.”