City of New Haven
Union Station already has a 112-room hotel, a swanky second-floor bar, a host of locally owned and managed restaurants, and shuffleboard tables just waiting to be enjoyed by train commuters.
That’s not New Haven Union Station, but Denver Union Station, which the city and state are looking to as a model for how to revamp New Haven’s transit hub.
New Haven and Denver’s respective Union Stations were at the center of Wednesday morning’s Development Commission meeting on the second floor of City Hall.
Thomas Breen photo
Tuesday morning’s Development Commission meeting.
City transit chief and Park New Haven Executive Director Doug Hausladen pitched the commissioners on a new collaboration among the city, the state, and the city’s parking authority to refresh the the retail and commercial landscape of New Haven Union Station. The conversation took place a day after Hausladen and Mayor Toni Harp led a group of prospective Union Station tenants on a tour of current and potential retail spots in the 100,000 square-foot, 100-year-old historic station.
Hausladen told the commissioners that the two marketing consultants hired by the parking authority to study and propose new retail options at Union Station are looking closely at Denver’s Union Station, another century-plus-old historic transit hub that has been transformed in recent years into a destination for people in transit as well as for people just looking for a good bite and a night out.
Click here to download a copy of Hausladen’s presentation to the commissioners.
Acting Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli and city transit chief Doug Hausladen.
“We’re not serving the customers very well” in Union Station’s current roughly 6,000 square-feet of commercial space, Acting Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli said.
Hausladen estimated that 2.7 million commuters come through Union Station every year. That number will only grow as the Hartford Line continues to pick up steam, and as new developments in the area add hundreds of more apartments to the Hill, Downtown, Ninth Square, and Wooster Square.
Hausladen.
“We have a real commuter retail demand,” Hausladen said. “The question is: What sort of destination can we create?”
That’s when the conversation turned to the success of Denver’s transit center transformation.
Built in 1914, just a half-decade before New Haven’s Cass Gilbert-designed, Beaux Arts station, Denver’s Union Station received a multi-million dollar overhaul in in first decade of the 21st century through partnerships between private developers and local, state, and federal governments. It’s now home to the 112-room Crawford Hotel, 10 local restaurants and bars, and a host of other local shops, including a bookstore and a cafe.
Denver’s second-floor train station bar.
The former ticket booth has been turned into a bar, Hausladen said, as has a basement-level former luggage storage room. The center of the station includes shufflepuck tables for commuters to play at as they wait for their trains.
Hausladen said that New Haven Union Station’s status on both state and national historic registers does present challenges in regards to how much can be changed in its current layout. But much of the current use of the space, he said, dates not to 1920, but to its the station’s reopening in 1984.
The benches in the center of the station’s grand concourse, for example, are not original to the historic building, he said. And while the ticket windows are original, their use can change even if the design remains the same.
“The notion that we still need 15 ticket windows in 2019 is laughable,” he said, with the ever-increasing popularity of e‑ticketing for trains.
East Rock Alder Charles Decker.
Hausladen and East Rock Alder Charles Decker, who happened to have visited Denver’s Union Station just two days prior while on vacation, said that the signal achievements of that train station rehab that New Haven should look to emulate are its adaptive reuse of a historic space, the playfulness and variety of different local vendors included in the new space, and its function as the epicenter of a pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhood that encircles the station.
“It really feels of a piece with the neighborhood,” Decker said.
Development Commissioner David Valentino and Commission Chair Pedro Soto.
Development Commission Chair Pedro Soto asked Hausladen how a planned refresh of Union Station might be funded.
First, Hausladen and Piscitelli said, the parking authority’s marketing consultants are going to finish their study, and craft a Request for Proposal (RFP) document to be distributed to prospective new retailers interested in renting one of the existing retail spaces. That RFP should go out later this year.
But in terms of building out new spaces, he said, his team is still looking to identify funding sources. That could come from the state, which owns the city-managed station, or it could come from businesses themselves interested in setting up shop at Union Station.
The parking authority has a capital budget dedicated to Union Station, he said, but that only covers the cost of cleaning the limestone and redoing signage.
Development Commissioner Miguel Pittman.
Have you presented any of these plans to neighboring community management teams? Commissioner Miguel Pittman asked.
Hausladen said he’s already broached the topic with the Hill South Community Management Team, and plans to attend the next Downtown-Wooster Square Community Management Team meeting to discuss the latest.
As someone who recently visited Denver with other people from Connecticut, I remember having this exact conversation that putting in a bookstore, retail, and food options at Union Station would make the train station that much more a place. The Denver doppelganger has plenty of shops and restaurants around it in a way that New Haven does not (meaning they are in sight of the train station, less than a two-minute walk from it).
Denver also has a free bus/shuttle on 16th Street that takes passengers from places like Union Station throughout Downtown Denver on this one main avenue. They accomplished this by getting rid of cars entirely from the street except in cross street traffic. I think the same thing could happen on Chapel. Let people park in one area, and then take a free bus/shuttle to the hotel they're staying at, the museums, or restaurants, etc. It really incentivized exploration of the areas you could get to by this free bus/shuttle.
If this theoretical shuttle ran from State Street to Howe, it puts literally all of downtown in walking distance.
https://www.denver.org/listing/16th-street-mall-pedestrian-mall/4249/