In order to build
two new residential colleges for nearly 1,000 students, Yale University is moving ahead with its plans to demolish a number of historic buildings on a large site located just north of the
Grove Street Cemetery. Controversy over the extensive scale of demolition, and the limited amount of recent public dialogue, has ignited a fairly widespread public appeal for Yale University to delay its plan.
Please refer to the following link for our earlier coverage of the colleges, including links to all of the renderings and plans:
http://downtownnewhaven.blogspot.com/2009/05/renderings-released-of-new-yale.html. Design New Haven thanks its readers for their significant research contributions to the article below.
The ControversyThe plan for demolition, which is scheduled to begin as soon as Wednesday, September 2 following the expiration of the city's standard 90-day delay of demolition ordinance, has drawn a nearly-unified chorus of concern from preservation groups, including the City of New Haven Historic District Commission, the
New Haven Preservation Trust, the New Haven Urban Design League, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and the
National Trust for Historic Preservation. Some of the buildings proposed for demolition (including Mudd Library, shown here) are detailed at the end of this article.
Mr. C. Michael Tucker, the past president of the New Haven Preservation Trust, outlined the concerns in an
eloquent open letter published in the Register on August 2:
As preservationists, and particularly as inhabitants of New Haven, we thought the noble but misguided approach of urban renewal — tear it all down and start afresh — had been discredited. Yet Yale, in its plans for the new colleges and the new School of Management, a couple of blocks away, shows that it still hasn’t learned the real lesson of urban renewal: that while individual buildings can be important, it’s equally important to look at how they function as parts of larger streetscapes and neighborhoods.
The new colleges may be handsome, but they won’t bear any relationship to the neighborhoods they will adjoin. It seems that the real reason Yale doesn’t want to reuse historic buildings is that they don’t “look like Yale.” This may be good marketing, but it’s bad urban design.
Several city preservation groups have openly asked the University not to proceed with its impending demolition plan until a reasonable "preservation plan" is created. These preservation groups believe that their request is reasonable because the University does not have approved plans, because the project represents the demolition of a large area that has not been well-documented or studied as part of a plan, and because only a fraction of the $600+ million needed for the project has been raised.
In a
letter in the New Haven Register, the Preservation Trust argued that it had never been consulted about the project, and had not approved its scope.
According to coverage in the
New Haven Register, the Historic District Commission later drafted a letter opposing the demolition, requesting that consideration be given to several of the buildings deemed to be most significant:
“The era of mass razing of historic buildings to provide clean sites is over. These buildings are representative of more than 250 years of New Haven’s architectural and cultural history. As such they are an important part of the historic and cultural fabric of the city of New Haven,” said the draft, which Chairman Eric O’Brien read into the record at the commission’s meeting this week.
Although some preservationists have
tried to draw a link between the current Yale plan and urban renewal efforts from the 1950s and 1960s, which leveled large areas of the city using Federal grants (Boston, arguably the worst hit, shown here), the scale of demolition is not comparable. First, the current site encompasses only 6.5 acres, much of it already home to secondary uses such as parking lots or temporary structures. And unlike several residential and mixed-use neighborhoods that have been recently cleared to construct various public schools or
hospital buildings in New Haven, the buildings on this site are used only for university academic purposes and have no residents.
Second, the site will be home to new buildings that will greatly increase the density of activity in the area, and result in an
unprecedented economic benefit to New Haven. In addition to PILOT payments and direct revenues (with Yale agreeing to additional "voluntary payments" to the city for each new student enrolled), an enlarged student population will require significant resources, staff and faculty, providing hundreds of new jobs within the city.
Although the loss of urban fabric is of serious concern -- particularly in neighborhoods bordering the Downtown area of New Haven, which represent one of the best preserved, most delightfully-contiguous outdoor museums of urban history in the entire United States -- it must be balanced with the urgent need to grow the city's economy. Preservationists recognize this of course, and are simply arguing for a more sensitive and thoughtful approach.
The new residential colleges also have the obvious potential to improve the entire neighborhood urbanistically, with pedestrian pathways, new connections to the Dixwell neighborhood, and landmark towers and vistas. But, perhaps as an aside here, the new development would be particularly beneficial to the urban environment if it incorporated a mix of uses (like retail space) and improved multi-modal transportation. Given the college's distance from the traditional core of the campus, a number of students and alumni have expressed particular concern over the project's lack of consideration to multi-modal transportation, handicapped accessibility and
pedestrian safety in an
open public letter to President Levin last year. Unfortunately, preliminary plans for the colleges show little in the way of mixed-use retail activity, bike/ped accommodations, bus stops, or methods to address the inevitable traffic congestion at Prospect and Sachem: an intersection that has seen a number of serious collisions. However, detailed site and traffic plans for the buildings will be approved at a much later phase, and hopefully address these issues.
Though preservationists also have a point that Yale has
not yet announced it has raised the large sum of money needed to construct the structures, and has not had specific plans approved -- raising the possibility that the site could be left as an open lot much longer than anticipated -- there is probably little reason to doubt the motives of the Yale Corporation's 10-year ongoing effort to build the new colleges, or Yale's ability to dedicate the necessary funding.
In this case, preservationists' appeals are based on the idea that Yale University (and its Dean of
Architecture,
Bob Stern, whose firm has been hired to design the new $600 million buildings) should be held to a much higher standard of planning. In other words, entities like Yale should research and share all information on the buildings prior to demolition, evaluate all potential alternatives as part of a long-term and holistic campus plan for preservation, relocate valuable structures where possible and appropriate, and not engage in the needless and unsustainable demolition of buildings that are perfectly suitable for rehabilitation and re-use.
In order to focus attention on these planning possibilities, Pat Pinnell, a well-known architect and author of the Princeton Architectural Press's
Campus Guide to Yale University, has sketched several schemes (one shown at left) that would preserve several existing buildings while providing enough space for two new colleges. Others have argued that Yale should build one college on the site, and find a location for the second in any number of other locations.
Unfortunately, these plans do not seem to address Yale's stated desire to, within a fairly strict budget, build two dormitories as soon as possible while incorporating within each one a spacious courtyard big enough for enormous commencement crowds, an opulent private home for the Master (resident faculty members), a baronial dining hall and other facilities.
Perhaps, even more importantly than any programmatic requirements, a core goal of the design is the creation of an overall "feeling of space," one which will make the new colleges similar in intent and use to the
Memorial Quadrangle: the first, and most luxurious, of Yale's original colleges, now known as
Branford and Saybrook. In a September 1920 review of the Quadrangle, the New York Times wrote:
Not only is this the most extensive of building projects ever carried out at Yale, but it is also the most striking and interesting from every point of view. Here is a solid city block... for a single, comprehensive development. The whole plot was swept clear of its college buildings, its private houses and its little shops... Entering one of the small courts on the south side, one faces an Elizabethan cottage, a building with long, sloping roof of bright tiles .... The massing of the buildings has been done so that it seems the community has grown up after the manner of an old village....
With ample space, they are not called upon to do impossible things in the way of providing room and are not piled up to uncomfortable heights. Running along the south side they are only a single story in height in places, rising to two, three and four stories, and to towers and turrets elsewhere. The whole arrangement is delightfully irregular and the visitor wandering through the courts meets a surprise at almost every turn.
It is likely that this type of luxuriant, varied and spacious program within the two new colleges -- which would be a difficult challenge for any architect to create within such a constrained area -- can best be accommodated if Yale clears the entire site.
At this point, Yale does not need preservationists' approval to move forward with its plans. Whether or not the University will decide to incorporate a few pieces of the existing structures into the new colleges -- or decide to respond to preservationists' requests to move and preserve the older homes on the site -- may be apparent soon after the demolition crews arrive this week.
About the Buildings: "Demolition Alley"?At recent meetings, the New Haven Preservation Trust offered information on the special significance of the
Eaton House, and offered to help find affordable ways to move
88 and 94 Prospect Street - two buildings which Yale claimed would cost several million dollars a piece to move to empty sites within the residential neighborhood around the corner on Sachem Street.
Others cited the exceptional importance of
Hammond Hall (shown here), the Beaux Arts style metallurgical laboratory designed in 1904 by Gedney Beatty and the Seeley Mudd Library, a new building designed by Harold Roth in 1982.
Hammond Hall was part of the Yale bicentennial building program, when
Beaux Arts architecture transformed the campus and brought in many iconic Yale buildings, including Commons, Byers, Kirtland, Sprague, and Woodbridge Halls. Beaux Arts decorative programs were characterized by expressive designs and robust detailing, even in the case of this unusual building, which is half factory, half academy. Cross-sections and plans of the building, which contained a library, museum and lecture rooms as well as massive halls for research, may be found in the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining, Vol 40, available through Google Books. Located next to the
Farmington Canal corridor, where it could receive shipments of metal ores by railroad for large-scale chemical research experiments, the building's facade is a play of rough and refined elements, mirroring its program.
The massive, lofty building was later home to the Yale art school's sculpture department, and known for many years of wild Halloween parties of a truly industrial scale. Although the building is impossible to move, incorporating part of its facade into the new residential colleges, or transforming its 40'-high, rugged main industrial hall into a dining hall, would certainly be an interesting feat.
Like Hammond Hall, the
Seeley Mudd Library is an exceptionally fine building. Although it was designed for compact storage of books, its proportions (20' by 20' bays) where established to allow the building to be converted to other uses in the future, such as classrooms and music practice rooms. The Urban Design League argues that destroying a fine, well built, flexible structure that cost $25 million to build in 1982 is wasteful and environmentally irresponsible.
Incidentally, the losses of Hammond and Mudd Library may be the first in a so-called "Demolition Alley" along Sachem Street, as the University plans to remove the School of Management (SOM) buildings on the corner of Prospect and Sachem, a block away from Mudd, perhaps rebuilding the library there, while SOM, in turn, plans to move a block down Sachem Street to Whitney Avenue, where the plan is to demolish several historic buildings (
PDF here) for a
new campus designed by Sir Norman Foster.
