Thomas Breen photo
New sidewalk under construction on Pearl St.
Construction has finally begun on a new sidewalk along a perilous stretch of Pearl Street that connects Yale’s business school with one of East Rock’s main corridors.
A construction crew has been busy at work this week building out that new sidewalk on the north side of Pearl Street between Orange Street and the Yale School of Management.
City Engineer Giovanni Zinn told the Independent in a Wednesday morning interview that that sidewalk-construction work began a couple weeks ago and should be done “fairly shortly, in the next week and a half.”
“It’s a new sidewalk,” he added, which means that the construction crew has to “clear and grade” the area, “put in a subbase, and pour and form the sidewalk itself.” He said that a utility pole and fire hydrant that both currently stand on the northern side of the road will ultimately be moved to make way for the new sidewalk. For now, the city will be putting in asphalt around those objects so that pedestrians can walk around them.
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, including then-Downtown Alder Abby Roth, successfully petitioned the city’s traffic authority to install new stop signs in 2019.
Then, in October 2020, the Board of Alders voted to accept $50,000 from Yale University to help cover the costs of the new sidewalk construction. Also in 2020, the city’s Resource Allocation Committee approved $40,000 in city funds to pay for the rest of the sidewalk work.
“It’s been a long time coming,” current Downtown/East Rock Alder Eli Sabin told the Independent on Wednesday. He praised Roth for working with SOM students and neighbors to successfully advocate for this sidewalk.
And he said he plans to stay in close touch with SOM about the new sidewalk once it’s open in order to encourage a “habit change” on a block where pedestrians, mostly Yale students, have become accustomed to walking in the street.
There’s nothing wrong with walking in the middle of the street and it is quite normal throughout New Haven (and everywhere else in the world) to see people walking in the middle of the street when traffic is light. We need slower traffic, not a habit change. That said, the new sidewalk seems like it will be very useful, too!