It fills in a failed urban renewal highway. Does that make it “new urbanism”?
That question has hovered above New Haven’s biggest development project in a generation, Downtown Crossing. Another way of asking the question: Is New Haven undoing a major mistake and learning from its past? Or is it repeating the mistake?
Mayor John DeStefano traveled to West Palm Beach, Florida, to try convince his toughest skeptics that New Haven has learned, that New Haven is rebuilding community and neighborhood and a lively streetscape where bulldozers once killed them. He spoke by invitation on a panel at a conference organized by a group called the Congress For The New Urbanism.
He earned points from the skeptics for showing up and making his case. He didn’t win many converts.
“With all due respect Mr. Mayor,” asked one participant, a designer from California, “what the fuck were you thinking?”
Here’s what DeStefano was and is thinking, he told the group: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
The “good” he referred to was Downtown Crossing, phase one of which is before the Board of Aldermen for approval.
Under the plan, DeStefano is hoping to fill in the Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere that slashed through downtown a half-century ago during the height of urban renewal. The dream then was to connect commuters from I‑95 to the Naugatuck Valley. It was called the “Oak Street Connector” though it was more like an Oak Street Eviscerator. And it was never finished. In the end, it just went three blocks — but helped destroy a neighborhood and separate downtown from the Hill.
The city hopes to begin its rebuilding effort by filling in the block nearest to the Air Rights Garage and having developer Carter Winstanley build a 10-story biomedical office building. That phase should cost $140 million, including Winstanley’s building and government-backed road changes.
At first blush, the enterprise seems to typify the “New Urbanist” creed. That philosophy calls for reversing the strategy of mid-20th century urban renewal (of which new Haven is the most concentrated example). Instead of large single-use modern buildings and highways and car-centric street grids, New Urbanism combines stores, apartments, green spaces, offices, all together on a human scale with a walkable and bikeable streetscape and narrow, slow-moving two-way roads. Downtown Crossing was originally sold as a way to stitch back together the Hill and downtown, with an emphasis on pedestrians and active street life.
By the time it came up for approvals, it featured the 10-story office building (pictured) with five lanes of one-way traffic and no new cross streets. Critics saw a new highway replacing an old highway, with endless cars and a corporate island keeping neighborhoods apart and people away. Officials estimate Downtown Crossing will bring the city hundreds of new jobs and more than $1 million in new annual tax revenue.
Click here and here and here to read some previous stories outlining that criticism. And click here to read a critical analysis released by New Haven’s Urban Design League.
That criticism spread from New Haven to the Congress for a New Urbanism, a national group. The group invited DeStefano down to an annual conference in Florida last week — and he accepted.
He knew to expect criticism. He hadn’t realized he would walk into a lion’s den.
He was one of four scheduled panelists to address a 2 p.m. breakout session called “Urban Freeways: Devastation and Opportunity.” New Haven was one of several examples of cities tackling “urban freeways [that] destroyed traditional, often poor, neighborhoods” and exploring how “to repair the urban fabric and make cities whole again.”
The mayor brought along a 19-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled “A Dream Comes True!” It began with the picture at the top of this article. Then-Mayor Dick Lee, the father of New Haven’s nationally watched urban renewal, distributed it as part of a 1959 campaign brochure to argue that he was remaking the city in a smart way to create jobs.
On the subject of the highway, DeStefano agrees with the new urbanists: It was a mistake.
“They thought the highway was the dream,” DeStefano said of the Lee administration planners in a subsequent conversation about his Friday presentation. They had rundown homes torn down all over town to make way for progress — including a home on East Street where the DeStefano family lived.
“Highways were used as slum clearance. We didn’t know we lived in a slum. We didn’t live in a slum. It was a three-family house with a lot of people,” DeStefano said.
He noted that the circled numbers in the flyer pointed to new buildings where new jobs beckoned: the George Street phone company headquarters, the College Plaza, the former Channel 8 retail plaza. The mayor made two observations about that. One: The planners saw transportation policy as a way to make way for new jobs. And two: All those locations have now morphed into medical-related labs and offices or Yale-owned space. “Eds and meds” — education and medical-related development, the current engine of New Haven’s job-creation strategy.
In other words, times change. And New Haven is rebuilding that area with new jobs in mind. We can learn from the past and still aim high the way the city did then.
“They were very smart and very competent and did a lot of great things. Dick [Lee] said, ‘Our goals were great, so too were our failures,” DeStefano said.
DeStefano also offered a slide (pictured) of how the city envisions the larger area developing over time as the highway fills in.
Other members of DeStefano’s panel discussed Boston’s Big Dig and Miami’s Overtown Expressway. When it came time for audience questions, almost all the attention turned to DeStefano and New Haven’s Downtown Crossing.
The participant asking the expletive-enhanced question quoted higher up in this story was R. John Anderson, founder of a Chico, California, architecture and design firm and a prominent New Urbanism proponent.
“We should not let the lame be the enemy of the perfectly adequate,” Anderson told DeStefano, according to notes taken by another New Havener present, Philip Langdon.
DeStefano’s reply: “You have no money on the table.” In other words: That’s nice in theory, but the city has to deal with practical realities like investment and revenue and the existing streetscape.
In his presentation, the mayor emphasized that the city has other priorities beyond design, such as school reform, job-creation and public safety. He also noted that his administration obtained 121 variances from Connecticut’s transportation department in the design to accommodate design concerns, including reducing travel lanes to 10 feet wide.
New Haven’s Langdon said he came away with the conclusion that the Dick Lee campaign brochure was an unintentionally apt choice for the mayor’s presentation: “The mayor is more in the Dick Lee tradition than he realizes.”
Anderson said Monday that he didn’t find the mayor’s response — that the city put together an important job-creation project that is worth pursuing even if it’s not perfect — convincing. He called Downtown Crossing as currently designed an “epic mistake.”
“I did tell the mayor that I believe he is making a huge mistake in making a lame project the enemy of a perfectly good project. By not reconnecting the street grid and leaving the grade separation, he is wasting the potential for future private investment in a high value area that can reconnect the medical district with downtown and the surrounding neighborhood,” Anderson wrote in an email message.
“The tone of the mayor’s remarks was that he had done all that could be done and the grown-ups had decided that half a loaf was better than none. The plan that mayor is pushing is breathtakingly stupid because it does not deliver even half a loaf. … I regret that I could not be more polite in my remarks following the mayor’s presentation, but we were all watching him blithely wander off into oncoming traffic. I hope that he will not continue on his current course.”
Norman Garrick, a UConn professor, praised DeStefano for showing up.
“I was real impressed that he did come. People had a different perspective of what we need to do,” Garrick said in a conversation Monday. “He got almost all the questions. It was people trying to get across a different design.”
Garrick’s takeaway from the event: “It doesn’t seem from their [the city’s] plan that they’re [really] losing the highway.
“What they’re building including the Winstanley building seems like a continuation of the suburbanization … It’s a big box. It’s a lot of cars. It’s not integrated with the neighborhood.”
DeStefano’s takeaway from the event: The designers in the audience don’t operate in the real world.
“We are removing a six-lane limited express highway. And their arguments had to do with number of turn lanes and lane width. It is fundamentally different than what is there now. To me the idea that somehow this is not an incredible departure is removed from any meaningful sense of reality,” DeStefano said Monday. “They just ignore any real discussion of budget constraints, any real grounding.”
For instance, DeStefano said, participants argued that the loading docks for the Smilow Cancer Hospital and other nearby facilities should return to street grade. (The city moved them to below the Air Rights Garage.) He said that would create a broad range of new traffic and safety problems. Similarly, he said, participants pointed to the three lanes of traffic coming off I‑91 at Trumbull Street as an example of how Frontage Road could work coming off the highway. “We have ten times as much traffic” there than at Trumbull Street, he said.
“I don’t have a green field [to build on from scratch],” DeStefano said. “I have an imperfect world that I’m trying to make it better. This makes it better. It’s an abstract exercise for them.”
In the end, despite some discussion he considered “bizarre to the extreme,” the mayor said he’s glad he ventured into the New Urbanist lion’s den.
“I love designers. But right now we’ve got this huge opportunity to do this project,” he said.
“I wish I was able to satisfy every person every way they’d like. I think that’s hard to do sometimes. I also think it’s good to have people prodding you and pushing you even though you find it annoying. What do we learn more from — our accomplishments, or our mistakes?”
The Mayor asks "What do we learn more from—our accomplishments, or our mistakes?" Downtown Crossing as it is currently configured has to potential to make Mayor DeStefano a very wise man.