Petition to Protect the Ninth Square

Original Post 7/19/08: The online version of the petition may be viewed by clicking here. See here for a background post about the buildings. A rally at the site was held on Friday, July 18th, at which approximately 50 paper signatures were collected. Check back again soon at DNH for updates.

Update 7/22/08: An article in today's New Haven Register claims that the current building owner, David Nyberg, has no plans to demolish the buildings, even though the structural engineer who analyzed them recommended tearing down a large rear section:

An engineer who analyzed the condition of historic industrial buildings on Crown Street six months ago recommended a rear portion be demolished, but the owner Monday said he has no intention of taking that action.... Nyberg owns the two structures and a third adjacent building on the Crown Street block that extends from State Street to Orange Street and has site plan approval to build 110-apartments in the three 19th and early-20th century buildings, plus one new building.

“I think there is a better way,” Nyberg said Monday.... “No question about it, we are not taking anything down.”

Nyberg Monday said the building facades will be restored to their original condition, and he was more confident than ever that work can restart by Sept. 1.

Rally to Protect New Haven's Historic Ninth Square

Rally: Friday, July 18, 2008, 12 Noon at 30-36 Crown Street

Three historic buildings on Crown Street, in the heart of New Haven’s Ninth Square National Register District are open to the weather, and have recently been subject to extensive internal demolition. This demolition has been done in the absence of plans for the use and renovation of the buildings. These buildings are important public resources, are irreplaceable, and must be saved for future generations.

A petition drive will be launched at the rally to protect endangered buildings:

26-28 Crown Street built c1875, a commercial block with the good detailing customary of the period – bracketed cornice work, arched cut stone window heads and lintels.

30-36 Crown Street built c1875, a highly unusual curtain wall warehouse building, with exceptionally fine multi-paned windows and composition of its frame and infill construction

40-46 Crown Street, c1910, the S.Z. Field Building, an industrial printing plant fitted out with classical detailing to give it a lively and dignified street façade. (credit for historic photo: New Haven Museum, New Haven Redevelopment Agency Collection, State Street project, file #437, Photographer: Ernest J. Vanacore, August 31, 1966)

For further information and copies of the petition, contact Anstress Farwell, President, New Haven Urban Design League, 129 Church Street Suite 419, New Haven, CT 06510, urbandesignleague@att.net, 203 624 0175; John Herzan, New Haven Preservation Trust, JohnHerzan@nhpt.org, 203 562 5919; or Kathleen Krolak, Town Green Special Services District, kathleen@downtownnewhaven.com, 203 401 4245.

Update 7/17/08: A New Haven Independent article on the buildings, including interviews and discussion of plans for the area, is posted here (a Register article is linked here). The article contains a link to the website of the architectural firm (Garvin Design Group), which if you click on "portfolio," "residential" and "Ninth Square," offers views of what adjacent planned residential structures might look like when built. The text reads:

"Anchoring the final block along Crown Street in New Haven's Ninth Square Historic District, this project seeks to continue the recent infusion of housing in this once struggling urban area. Three existing 19th & mid-20th-century warehouse and commercial structures will undergo extensive historic upfits as they are converted into one and two bedroom apartments. Commercial space at the ground level will help spur a revitalized urban experience. The surrounding alleys and peripheral ones [DNH: one of which, incidentally, would make an amazing urban "stage" for outdoor concerts or dining] will be converted into courtyards connecting the inner-block to the activity on the street. Accompanying the existing structures will be a new 5-story apartment building offering an additional 44 one and two bedroom apartment units to the eager public. Industrial contenxtual influences have shaped this residential project which promises to offer great views of the Ninth Square community. Offering diversity to the associated apartment development across Crown Street, is a 6 town home complex which joins its neighbor in the rebirth of this New Haven, CT historic district.... Upper level terraces and expansive glass will further the industrial language of the area's architectural heritage."

Update 7/19/08: The rally was highly successful and an online petition has been launched. See this post for information and updates.

Arts & Ideas Festival tours New Haven

The Arts & Ideas Festival has wrapped up its series of public walking and bicycling tours, many of which focused on Downtown New Haven's rich panoply of history and culture. The tours were hosted by the New Haven Preservation Trust, Elm City Cycling and the Broadway Merchants Association. Check these links for media coverage of the New Haven public art and public sculpture bicycle tour, Hillhouse Avenue historic district walking tour, and "free speech" bicycle tour. Other tour sites featuring Downtown New Haven included sacred architecture, waterfront neighborhoods, city planning and art galleries. Upcoming summer bicycle rides, including the Wednesday Night Ice Cream Rides, are posted on the calendar at http://www.elmcitycycling.org/. Group walking tours can be arranged by contacting Design New Haven and other Downtown organizations.

OffManhattan: Nix Hamptons for New Haven

From Manhattan's green weekend travel blog comes an earth-friendly itinerary for Downtown New Haven attractions. Aside from all of the transit-accessible, walkable downtown attractions, like the New Haven Green and retail operations, however, the article fails to point out one of the best things about a summer escape to New Haven - the excellent waterfront areas and public parks with hundreds of miles of hiking trails within a short walk or bicycle ride of the city center.

Of course, the idea of New Haven being a perfect compromise between thriving city and rural escape is nothing new: on February 12, 1842, Charles Dickens wrote:

"New Haven, known as the City of Elms, is a fine town. Many of its streets (as its alias sufficiently imports) are planted with rows of grand old elm-trees; and the same natural ornaments surround Yale College, an establishment of considerable eminence and reputation. The various departments of this institution are erected in a kind of park or common in the middle of town, where they are dimly visible among the shadowing trees. The effect is very like that of an old cathedral yard in England; and, when their branches are in full leaf, must be extremely picturesque. Even in the winter-time, these groups of well-grown trees, clustering among the busy streets and houses of a thriving city, have a very quaint appearance: seeming to bring about a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it; which is at once novel and pleasant."

New Materials in New Haven Architecture

Original Post, 4/29/08: April 2008 photographs of new buildings currently rising in Downtown New Haven. Through their unique material expression, these new works offer a window into contemporary life in New Haven.

Pictures include: Gwathmey Siegel's Loria Center for the History of Art and Rudolph Building Renovation at Yale on York (zinc panels and limestone facade), Cesar Pelli's Arts and Humanities Magnet High School on College (glass with elm leaves motif and copper stair towers and roof details), Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg's new Chapel Street hotel (glass curtain wall with color glass detail), Hopkins Architect's Kroon Hall at Yale (designed to be the most environmentally friendly building in the United States in terms of CO2 reduction, showing wood truss structure), and Studio ABK's historic renovation of a stunning building on the corner of Chapel and Orange (restored terra cotta and marble details at street level). Click to enlarge the photos.

With major new commissions such as the Yale School of Management New Campus (Sir Norman Foster), College Square (Robert A.M. Stern), 55 Park Street (Svigals + Partners and Behnisch Architects), Yale-New Haven Hospital's new 500,000 square-foot Cancer Hospital (SBRA), 360 State (Becker + Becker), University Health Services (Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam) and Gateway Community College (Perkins + Will) -- and many others -- currently in design or construction, the image of Downtown New Haven will be changing for years to come. Can New Haven sustain its longstanding reputation as a place for some of the nation's most groundbreaking architecture and design?

Update 6/2/08: Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings and Grounds site has a great new article about the Loria Center, which explains some of its interesting material qualities in greater detail. The irregular stone box of the Loria Center seems like a proper formal response to the idea of Yale being a stone campus, with each building featuring some kind of unique element in that material. In that way it can be iconic, but contextual. One of our readers points out that "it is very difficult to find a material compatible with concrete.... this stone, with its colors shifting from oyster to rust does it well."

Update 6/6/08: Another article from the Chronicle asks, what would you have done?

Green Drinks, Simple Pleasures, Pipas and Model City Blues

A trio of Downtown New Haven events this week (among many others):

1. New Haven’s monthly eco-friendly happy hour, New Haven Green Drinks, will be Wednesday, May 21, 6-8:00pm at Café Nine, at 250 State Street. This month Daniel Schaefer, the founder of the New Haven-based nonprofit Invested Citizens will be speaking on ways to make climate change and clean energy relevant to a wider audience. Remember to walk, bike, bus or carpool to the event.

2. New Haven band The Simple Pleasures - the featured musicians in the groundbreaking Yale School of Drama production of Baal last year - will play this Wednesday night at BAR. They are coming straight from their recent shows at Luna Lounge, Fortune Cookie and The Midway. On Friday night (5/23), check out Min Xiao-Fen's Asian Trio at Firehouse 12: Min Xiao-Fen is among the most renowned pipa masters in the world and has collaborated with Derek Bailey, Björk, Jane Ira Bloom, Tan Dun, Philip Glass, Susie Ibarra, the New York City Opera, Ned Rothenberg, Randy Weston and John Zorn among many others.

3. Mandi Isaacs Jackson, author of Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven, a new book about 1960s urban renewal and political struggle, will hold a discussion this Thursday, May 22nd at 5:30PM at Labyrinth Books New Haven.

Also, if you are an architecture writer, stay on the lookout for another one of Robert A.M. Stern's hard-hat tours of the renovated landmark Rudolph Building. The New Haven Register reports on Gwathmey Siegel's $130+ million Rudolph Building renovation here.

Downtown New Haven Unicycle Mania

Click here for New Haven Independent reporting on the latest Downtown New Haven impromptu circus event, and the city's unicycle craze:

Matt Feiner of the Devil’s Gear Bike Shop said that unicycles have been jumping off the shelves. “It’s crazy, it really is,” he said. “We’ve been selling about four or five a week for the last six weeks.”

Unicycling (well, or monowheeling) has hit New Haven before. At left, the 1869 US Patent 92,528 by Richard C Hemmings of New Haven, Connecticut. Not surprising for a city that was home to the world's first bicycle patent, and was home to a "velocipede craze" as early as 1819.

Lost City Mourns Yankee Doodle, Celebrates Perkins

New York's Lost City blog is sad over the passing of the Doodle Coffee Shop, but recommends a visit to Downtown New Haven's Perkins (not the restaurant). Nice photographs and commentary here.

CT Smart Growth highlights DNH and Route 34

Connecticut Smart Growth is an excellent blog for smart growth advocates in our state. Topics include brownfields, downtown redevelopment, responsible land use policy, and transportation. Visit their front-page post highlighting Design New Haven, and discussing the redevelopment of the Route 34 corridor, at http://www.ctsmartgrowth.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=173.

CTsmartgrowth points out that "more than 600 businesses and families (some of whom still gather at the annual Oak Street Reunion) were displaced to make way for the Rt. 34 Connector."

If you are interested in learning more about smart growth in Connecticut, also take a look at http://www.1000friends-ct.org/.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! (updated)

A fantastic cover story appears in today's Yale Daily News about the proposal to tear down (or at least modify) sections of the wall surrounding downtown New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery, one of the nation's most historic burying grounds -- the first incorporated cemetery in the United States, and a National Historic Landmark.

Vincent Scully: “Yale is cut right through the liver by that cemetery,” the emeritus Sterling professor of the History of Art said with characteristic zeal. “It would make a great difference if the cemetery were more welcoming.”

Certainly, more local residents would be able to appreciate this incredible historical resource if a pathway were added through the site. Yale Professor David Cameron added an op-ed on this New Haven landmark in today's Yale Daily News. But would adding a simple new gate or portion of iron fence have an impact on the site's character? The proposal raises questions about the nature of historic preservation, such as the need to conserve the material and cultural qualities of a built place for future generations (since it is conceivable that improving visual access from both sides of the site could actually help the site be preserved over generations by making it more meaningful to them) and the nature of the site's original intent (an issue brought up in the article):

"Denison Olmsted 1813, a Yale science professor, speaking at the gateway’s dedication, expressed his hope that there would be strong interaction between New Haven’s residents and its burial grounds.

“Let us all come hither to think calmly but wisely on our own inevitable destiny,” he pronounced.

Townshend, in his [1947] speech, added a few words that are perhaps the perfect explanation of the importance of open walls to achieving the ideal of Olmstead’s lofty words."

In that vein (no historically-relevant cadaver puns related to the Yale School of Medicine intended), how about tearing down a section of wall and adding a museum about the cemetery? Perhaps a new community conference center or a bike path? Or a cafe, a la Boston? The view of the cemetery is certainly beautiful, especially given the landmark's extensive history of horticulture.

Paul (from YDN comments): "The concerns voiced here that providing more pedestrian and visual access to Grove Street cemetery would somehow intolerably disturb it and its dead fly in the face of many counterexamples. For example, Trinty Church in lower Manhattan has a lovely cemetery that is quite open to the public, physically and visually. Boston has many such cemeteries. The list goes on and on. Resistance to providing more pedestrian access to Grove Street Cemetery in the face of world wide counterexamples and changing needs is just reactionary."

Also, although the issue is raised by many commentators, would personal security concerns be any different from what they are now, assuming appropriate levels of patrol and continuing to limit access to daylight hours?

100+ year-old Downtown business honored for being innovative

Business New Haven is reporting this week on how some independent New Haven retailers have leveraged their online presence into major business success. Delmonico Hatter, a small business that has been located in Downtown New Haven since 1906 and is quite renowned within the local community, recently received the "Hat Retailer of the Year" Award for its innovative retailing strategy.

"As soon as Delmonico launched the new site, DelmonicoHatter.com, in 2002, "Sales grew immediately, to 25 percent of our business that first year," [Delmonico] says. "They have grown every single year since then, and now account for 80 percent of our business."

Can other downtown businesses leverage their unique "bricks and mortar" into online sites in order to thrive? How long before we see frozen Louis' Lunch burgers being shipped to China? Is this strategy a "win" for Downtown New Haven? See the entire article at http://www.conntact.com/article_page.lasso?id=41842

A University in a Small City

Great photos and commentary from:

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9840

About Downtown New Haven

Downtown New Haven is the neighborhood located in the heart of the city of New Haven, Connecticut. It is comprised of the original nine squares laid out in 1638 to form New Haven, including the New Haven Green, and the immediate surrounding central business district, as well as a significant portion of the Yale University campus. The area includes many restaurants, cafes, theaters and stores. Downtown is bordered by Wooster Square to the east, Long Wharf to the southeast, the Hill neighborhood to the south, the Dwight neighborhood to the west, the Dixwell neighborhood to the northwest, the Prospect Hill area to the north, and East Rock to the northeast.

Downtown New Haven is one of the most residential downtown areas in the United States, with nearly 7,000 inhabitants.[1] The expansion of housing options in recent years has helped support downtown businesses and has brought about a surge in economic activity.[2] Secondary streets and areas at the periphery of the neighborhood that once contained vacant storefronts are now almost entirely leased to restaurants and retailers, and the office vacancy rate has seen a drastic improvement as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_New_Haven