Yale Ponies Up For Pearl Street Sidewalk

A new sidewalk slated to be built along a perilous stretch of Pearl Street is one step closer to becoming a reality, after committee alders unanimously endorsed letting Yale University foot roughly half the bill.

That was the outcome of Wednesday night’s Board of Alders Community Development Committee meeting. The virtual local legislative hearing took place online via the Zoom videoconferencing platform and on YouTube Live.

The committee alders voted unanimously in support of installing a new sidewalk on the north side of Pearl Street between Orange Street and the Yale School of Management.

They also threw their unanimous support behind accepting a $50,000 donation from Yale to fund part of the construction, leaving the remaining $40,000 worth of funding to be filled in by the city’s capital budget.

That two-block stretch where Pearl Street crosses Lincoln Street currently has a sidewalk only on the south side of the street. It also has relatively new stop signs installed at the intersection of Pearl and Lincoln, which is where former Yale School of Management student Katherine Cattanach was struck by a car and injured in early 2019. Lincoln Street neighbors, who had long called for traffic calming on the block, successfully petitioned the city’s traffic authority to install new stop signs last year.

“This has been a longstanding issue that I’ve heard from constituents about since the School of Management opened,” Downtown Alder Abby Roth said during Wednesday’s hearing. ​“It has a driveway in the back that feeds into the middle of Pearl Street, leaving pedestrians to walk in the middle of Pearl Street.” Lincoln has a fair amount of cut-through traffic, she said, by drivers looking to avoid the Orange Street-Trumbull Street highway onramp.

Roth read a letter of support for the project by Pearl Street resident and local safe streets organizer Lorena Mitchell. ​“Our city has seen too many traffic fatalities this year,” Roth quoted Mitchell as writing. Putting in a new sidewalk on this busy stretch of Pearl represents ​“one small step forward that we prioritize traffic safety for all.”

Cattanach, who recently graduated from SOM, called in from New York City Wednesday to agree.

“This has been an unsafe intersection for a number of years,” she said. ​“I was incredibly fortunate” in not being more seriously injured after getting hit by a car at that intersection. ​“I hope to ensure there are no further incidents there.”

SOM Student Body President Julia Frederick said she lives at the corner of Orange Street and Pearl Street, and crosses along that very stretch of Pearl on a daily basis.

“I see students and neighbors walking up and down Pearl Street all the time getting in potential harm’s way and having to jump out of the street as cars turn,” she said. ​“Everything thinks that this effort is a no-brainer.”

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, the city official who formally introduced the proposed order to the Board of Alders, encouraged local legislators to support accepting the $50,000 from Yale and signing off on the sidewalk construction. He said that the city’s Resource Allocation Committee has already approved the use of $40,000 in city funds to cover the rest of the sidewalk construction cost.

“This is a longstanding Complete Streets request,” he said. ​“It is an area of particularly high pedestrian intensity. I think it’s a definite public safety improvement to install the sidewalk on the north side of the street.”

Dwight Alder Frank Douglass thanked Yale for the ​“generous contribution in helping us with the funding of our sidewalks.”

“We’ve got a lot of sidewalks and they need to be repaired,” he continued. Perhaps Yale could keep up the generosity and help with sidewalk repairs and installations elsewhere in the city.

Hill Alder Carmen Rodriguez agreed. She encouraged the university to ​“look around for more areas that need assistance with sidewalks. Let this one be the beginning” of Yale working with the city to fund much-needed pedestrian safety improvements.