SHEPLEY BULFINCH RENDERING
The proposed new neuroscience center building.
Dwight neighbors voted to form a committee to negotiate with Yale New Haven Hospital to make sure that the community isn’t left behind by the latter’s planned new $838 million neuroscience center and St. Raphael campus expansion — especially when it comes to parking.
The Dwight Community Management Team took that 11 – 1 favorable vote Tuesday night during its regular monthly meeting in the Amistad Middle School gym on Edgewood Avenue.
Stacy Spell cast the sole dissenting vote.
The newly formed committee represents the latest step in the hospital’s ongoing community engagement efforts in the neighborhood around the planned nearly $1 billion contract. It came the same night that the full Board of Alders unanimously granted the hospital all of the legislative approvals it needed in order to proceed with site plan review and construction later this spring.
Dwight residents have expressed skepticism at both management team meetings and aldermanic committee hearings about the impact that the neuroscience center’s planned new 700-plus-space Orchard Street parking garages will have on traffic, air quality, and pedestrian safety in the area.
Maya McFadden Photo
Pat Wallace and Stacy Spell at Tuesday night’s community management team meeting.
Longtime Dwight resident Pat Wallace said the neighborhood has always been a “hotspot” because of its density, walkablility, and historic character.
Tuesday night, Wallace took the lead in promoting the creation of the new neighborhood committee for the neuroscience center project.
“With more working together, we might be able to help make parking less of a burden for the neighborhood,” she said.
She added that the committee should prioritize encouraging the hospital to invest more in multimodal transit for its employees, and for neighbors.
Wallace asked her fellow Dwight residents to join the committee to work with both the city and hospital to mitigate parking and traffic impact on the neighborhood. Hospital and city staff present at Tuesday’s meeting agreed to engage with the neighborhood for planning around mitigating traffic impacts.
“It would be a good thing to deepen the human connections between the people who live here and the people who drive in, in some cases from far away,” Wallace said.
Management Team Chair Florita Gillespie said she voted in support of the resolution that created the committee because of her knowledge of the high number of Dwight youth with severe asthma.
“We want to deal with the traffic coming in because that’s a health hazard,” she said.
Spell said he voted against the new collaborative effort in part because of YNHH’s previous, unsuccessful push to demolish the two joined Queen Anne
style brick houses at 596 and 598 George St.
Those buildings were spared demolition and YNHH construction in 2017 , and are now owned by the city.
I most certainly did not use the term support team. It does not capture the practical problem solving we believe needs to happen should happen and, we hope can happen to address issues that neighbors have with the concentration of medical parking that is planned for this low-income neighborhood with health challenges, including asthma rates. Neighborhood leaders met with the hospital to express our concerns about traffic, parking and the design of the garage. These were expressed at the public hearing. The Hospital agreed to work with us to explore our issues. The City will be at the table as well. The neighborhood is supportive of the Neuro Center. We have requested technical support for our neighborhood issues from several sources, and will formalize those requests in letters today, following adoption of a resolution last night. Our concerns are serious. We are pleased the Hospital is willing to sit down with us. Please correct this error in this story.
[Ed.: Done. Thanks.]