Thomas Breen photo
Yale's Science Hill, soon to boom with new lab and classroom building.
Yale took three small steps forward in its plans to construct a football stadium-sized — at least in square footage — physical sciences and engineering building on university-owned property known as “Science Hill.”
During Monday night’s latest biweekly full Board of Alders meeting in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall, local legislators voted unanimously in support of three resolutions certifying that there are no need for amendments to Yale’s Central/Science Campus Overall Parking Plan for various development proposals put forward for a stretch of campus bounded by Whitney Avenue, Edwards Street, and Prospect Street.
One such resolution pertains to the expansion of a surface parking lot known as Lot 15, located at 339 Prospect St. Another pertains to the expansion of a surface parking lot known as Lot 63, located on the west side of Prospect Street and the south side of Hillhouse Place. And the third pertains to the planned construction of an addition to the existing Wright Laboratory Building at 272 Whitney Ave.
As detailed in three separate letters sent to the alders on Sept. 22 by Yale Vice President for Facilities and Campus Development J. Michael Bellamy, these three resolutions and their associated development projects are all “enabling” projects for the future development “of a new physical sciences and engineering building on the Science Hill block.”
Monday’s vote by the Board of Alders did not apply to any specific building plans for this new lab and classroom development. All it means in practice is that Yale does not have to amend its parking plan with the city in order to move forward with these three smaller enabling projects which are all designed to tee up the larger construction project, which will still require future review by alders and the City Plan Commission.
“The Physical Sciences and Engineering Building (PSEB) will serve as a hub for Yale’s work in both traditional and emerging fields identified in our academic priorities: quantum computing, engineering, materials science, and advanced instrumentation development,” Strobel wrote at the time. “These areas represent enormous opportunity for discovery and innovation.” He wrote that the final building will consist of more than 600,000 square feet, “only slightly less square footage than the Yale Bowl. In addition to laboratories, classrooms, and a state-of-the-art clean room, the building will house the Advanced Instrumentation Development Center, a core resource to support instrumentation development across the university.”
In a Sept. 20 site plan application for the Wright Laboratory development work, Bellamy made clear that this project “is an enabling project to the development of a new physical sciences and engineering building (PSEB) and associated improvements which will be located, in part, on the site of the existing Wright Laboratory West building. The PSEB building and associated improvements are currently in the design phase and will be the subject of a future application which will also address the removal of the existing Wright Laboratory West building.”
Westville Alder Adam Marchand.
During Monday night’s full Board of Alders meeting, Westville Alder Adam Marchand told his colleagues that the three development plans under parking-impact consideration will reduce the total number of parking spaces in this part of Yale’s campus by 22 spaces, which is not enough to trigger a mandatory change to the city-Yale parking agreement.
“These three projects pave the way for a much larger development” in the form of the planned new physical sciences and engineering building, he said. Even though the alders voted that there was no need for a change to the city-Yale parking plan based on these three enabling projects Monday night, Marchand continued, “this body may wish to study” that new building’s parking impact and potentially require a change to the city-Yale parking plan in the future.
The northeast corner of Science Hill, near Whitney and Edwards.
It's too bad there's so much housing for cars, but no housing for people.
It would be nice if this project included a 50-story residential tower along Whitney Avenue.
I'm not surprised that Yale is expanding given that it just raised many billions of dollars in new gifts, and that is a good thing for the city overall. However, adding thousands of additional students and faculty without adding any more housing for them is going to continue to wreck the New Haven housing market.