Adam Weber Photo
Painted street-crossings, above, started the process of restitching the borders of Wooster Square and downtown.
State Street is poised to recover some of the street life it lost to urban renewal — albeit in an update form — thanks to $5 million in economic development cash heading our way from the State of Connecticut.
Gov. Ned Lamont Wednesday announced the $5 million New Haven allotment, one of 12 such grants aimed at “improving the livability and vibrancy of communities” through “long-lasting and equitable economic development.” (Those quotations come from this press release, which details the 12 “Connecticut Communities Challenge” grants.)
New Haven’s grant comes to $5,355,840. It will help the city reconfigure State Street from Audubon to George to make the area safer for people to travel and open up room for new development.
The city has been working on that goal for years in collaboration with Wooster Square and Downtown neighbors, including conducting a public visioning process about the area’s future. (Click here to read about one such effort.)
Now the work can get started.
Mayor Justin Elicker called the grant “a game changer.” Downtown Alder Eli Sabin, who helped work on the grant proposal, said the money offers New Haven “the opportunity to invest in knitting Wooster Square and downtown together.”
“We’re excited about this,” city Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli said Thursday.
The engineering department will lead the design process in conjunction with his office and transportation, traffic and parking. They plan to hold community meetings to gather public ideas and feedback on the details.
Under the new plan, the city looks to remove the median from the road. Car traffic will remain two-lane in both directions. But new land will open up to make more room for pedestrians and cyclists — and for building anew on what are now surface parking lots.
Initial estimates envision building up to 447 residential units and perhaps 80,000 square feet of stores.
The state State Street grant reflects a popular trend in urban planning: “transit-oriented development,” building near train stations.
A key portion of the project lies on the east side of State just south of Chapel Street and the State Street train station. That’s one of the State Street stretches where they city razed stores during the mid-20th Century urban renewal period to make way for a wider road, part of a broader (and now much-maligned) strategy of designing the center of town first and foremost to help suburbanites drive in and out as fast as possible.
The city will put the newly reclaimed land there out to competitive bids for building on the newly widened parcels of land, Piscitelli said. Developers have been already rushing in to build new apartments on nearby blocks, from the 360 State Street tower to several complexes currently under construction on the Wooster Square side of the train tracks. Piscitelli said he envisions mixed-use developments on the newly reclaimed State Street land.
Paging Jane Jacobs
Piscitelli: TCB of TOD.
Will that include a return to the first-floor retail that got destroyed in the mid-20th century — but never evaporated from the popular imagination?
“We have some confidence” that the train stations at both ends of the corridor will produce enough foot traffic to support some first-floor retail, Piscitelli said.
He’s not certain: He said that already rising new developments, including at Chapel & Olive streets, will offer an “early test” of that proposition.
For four decades now, New Haven planners have encouraged the inclusion of first-floor retail in new developments from the Ninth Square to Winchester Avenue, a response to the consensus that New Haven erred in razing so many stores during urban renewal.
That consensus embraces the critique made famous by the late Jane Jacobs, that urban renewal destroyed community by eviscerating vibrant street/sidewalk life.
But not all those new developments have succeeded in filling those first-floor storefronts. The upper floors, especially apartments, have proved easier to fill.
Another way to frame the urban renewal critiquie is that the error in razing stores and apartments in the 1950s and 1960s lay in ignoring market forces — bulldozing the fruits of individual investments in the kinds of places people at the time wanted in favor of theoretical government-funded and government-planned developments. In that telling, the destruction of storefronts was the symbol, not the enduring definition, of the error.
Retail trends have changed since then, so what the market demands now may have changed. Or maybe not.
New Haven now has a $5 million infusion toward finding out.
this is awesome and looonnnngggg overdue. an obvious opportunity for more density near the train stations and reconnecting several vibrant neighborhoods/areas in the city. impossible to drive down that section of state street for the last decade and not see the need for re-narrowing the street and re-building on top of those sad parking lots.