Today Real Hartford introduces a new series: Grid, Interrupted. This will be a glimpse at some of a street or block’s history.
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A recent piece in the Courant painted a kind of dreamer’s dream. It reported that the State of Connecticut’s laboratory building, pictured above, is being vacated and is potentially slated for demolition. The Bushnell is eying this spot for condominiums and apartments. Other desired changes to this area: retail and restaurants. A potential change: a parking garage on part of a surface lot and the possibility of a garage elsewhere with (maybe) housing and (maybe) a restaurant surrounding it.
Lovely, ain’t it?
But what the iQuilt supporters have skated around is obvious and simple: no neighborhood is going to exist until all those hideous and isolating surface lots are dealt with, seriously. There have been no concrete promises made to replace surface lots with vertical parking structures. In a 2003 piece by Tom Condon, which is not entirely unlike the one just published by the same newspaper, there was talk of townhouse condos being built on the north west corner of Buckingham and Hudson (still parking lot) and townhouses along West Street. At that time, the Kenneth Greenberg plan was still being talked up. Then, there was no criticism of the abundance of surface lots and The Bushnell went on record saying that it did not want to give up any parking. Even then, there was talk of maybe building a parking garage behind the State building at Capitol Avenue and Washington Street, but the hedging was blamed on finances.
What needs to be said is that we can not afford to continue disrupting the grid with the kind of sprawling surface parking one finds at suburban malls. It may work in Manchester or West Hartford, but it does not work in an urban setting. Until the waffling on these surface lots at Capitol and West stops, there is no reason for residents to believe anyone is serious about transforming this area into a “neighborhood.”
Doubting that this is a problem? Go to the intersection of Capitol Avenue and West Street. Look around. Too lazy to walk or look on Google Street View? Here are two pictures showing you the view:
Each corner of that intersection is a surface parking lot. What neighborhood feels unified with that kind of disruption?
The article, glowing about The Bushnell’s dreams for potential development, quotes a city architect claiming this renewal could result in the area rivaling the West End — a statement problematic as much for what it implies as for what it may not fulfill.
This segment of Downtown was not always so desolate. The Courant piece goes back to 1920, but to appreciate this, one must go back even further.
Let’s start with the lot above and the year 1923. After five years of planning, the Mount Sinai Hospital opened at 119 Capitol Avenue, in what had been a mansion taking up a nice chunk of space near West Street. What was originally called the Abrahan Jacobi Hospital had been looking at a space on Love Lane and Westland Street, but this fell through. The facility changed its named and purchased the estate belonging to Morgan Brainard, nephew of Morgan Bulkeley. When Bulkeley died in 1922, his nephew replaced him as president of Aetna; Brainard was also in charge of the Connecticut Historical Society beginning in 1922.
Previous to Brainard’s residence, this was not wide open space. The mansion had other owners, including Orlando H. Miner, C.H. Brainard (one of the city’s highest taxpayers in 1880s), and members of the Porter-Valentine family around the turn of the previous century. The Porter-Valentines also had ties to Aetna. A descendant of Rev. Thomas J. Hooker lived at 119 Capitol Avenue.
Of course, this mansion had its neighbors. mostly residential. Even ten years after the Bushnell opened, land records show that most of the residential units within a few blocks were filled, leaving only a handful of vacancies. If the Bushnell has a dream, it might look back to the 1940s when the nearby area of Capitol Avenue, West Street, Buckingham, and Clinton Street also hosted a barber, a grocer, Smith’s Store House (new and second-hand furniture and appliances), a food shop, stationary manufacturers, a print shop, and an undertaker, in addition to the State offices and churches still in existence.
Before the performing arts center was constructed during the Great Depression (1930), the residential component was more stable. This is not to imply that the Bushnell influenced housing stock; this is just how the neighborhood looked. Additionally, in 1917, the Trustees of Trinity College, Aetna Realty, and Puritan Laundry were in the area. A few years earlier, this neighborhood had insurance companies lining the streets. In the last few decades of the 19th century, this area did not have the small businesses, but was residential with the churches and Trinity College trustees. The State Armory — then called “First Regiment Armory” — could be found at 51 Elm Street, before it was relocated to its present location in 1909. In 1823 Trinity College could be found in the space now used by the State Capitol; it was called Washington College until 1845. The area of “College Hill” was sold to the City of Hartford in 1872.
Before all that, this segment of Capitol Avenue was called College Street for a time, and other area streets’ former names hint of what had been there. Trinity Street had gone by both College Place and Upper Mill Street. Elm Street was previously known as Park Row and Tanner’s Lane. Remember, the Park River is right there, only now, is buried out of sight.
What happened?
After Mount Sinai vacated 119 Capitol for its place in a neighborhood north of Downtown, it became the State Office Building Annex. Among other uses, it had been operating the “Division of Health Services for State Employees” for a time, offering physical exams, immunizations, x-rays, and treatments for State employees. Records show that over 700 State employees were treated at the clinic during its first six months of operation from December 1950 to June 1951. The State of CT Register and Manual indicates that the building served multiple functions, including war veterans’ offices. The Annex stopped appearing on the State record after 1965, but a 1965 aerial survey shows multiple structures still standing in the area between Capitol, Buckingham, West, and Washington/Trinity Street. Now? All surface parking.
You can’t seal up a city in a time capsule. Things change. But when a particular vision is lauded without critical thinking — which includes asking difficult and provocative questions — sometimes those changes are for the worse.
David Panagore
Kerri, I agree 100% , its the parking lots that have to be dealt with, and transformed into townhouses, reknitting the Capital Ave, Buckingham feel with maybe state structured parking behind (problem though is the loss of brownstone gardens behind the buildings which are key. A hundred to 200 I would bet units. I think towers are not financially feasible and I think its the wrong look and feel so close to the state house (isn’t there a bar against thinks near the state house being higher than the dome ?) I don’t think one article in the Courant reflects the full critical thinking that has and will have to go into a project like this if it can come to pass. Roman was neither built nor conceived in a day. I think its right and proper to bring up un-discussed, critical or new aspects, but the assumption that iQuilt proponents like myself are not critical thinkers is just another example of the Hartford divisiveness, so instead I take it as constructive supportive criticism. It a long road from one article to a realized project and good criticism should always be valued.
Chris Brown
I don’t see anything divisive in the wording. I have been to countless iquilt meetings and presentations (since meeting #2 at the Bushnell) over the years and the only change I recall proposed for those barren acres of parking was to replace the impermeable asphalt with a water-permeable surface and add “bio-swale” plantings to filter some of the oily runoff. The lot issue has been avoided repeatedly by my observation and pointing this out is not only responsible and needed, it should happen more often until a real plan emerges to address this elephant in the room.
Patrick Pinnell
Yes, the clear-cutting of buildings for surface parking, all over Downtown but here in particular, is tragic and unnecessary. I’ve written and talked about it since helping Ken Greenberg with the Downtown Action Strategy in 1998. But the bipartisan scandal behind the asphalt here is the complete absence of an overall State of Connecticut master plan for the capitol area. The various governors, elected reps, and bureaucrats have seemingly been oblivious to the odiousness of their own working environment for an easy thirty years and more. And we trust them with running Connecticut? I say, until this gets fixed, all of them have to park in the Morgan Street Garage and hoof it over through Downtown.
Chris Brown
This isn’t the most important part of the matter, but that Dept. of Health building isn’t so bad. Mid-century modern isn’t my first aesthetic choice, but it’s good example of the era and sort of neat in a way. Unless there is some real irreparable structural deficiency (independently verified), it’s wasteful and short-sighted to demolish it. The Bushnell and the state have existed through, and capitalized on, the destruction of their surrounding neighborhood for their precious parking “needs”. They need to undo the damage they have benefited from before anyone could take their “neighborhood-building” efforts with anything less than a plow truck spreader’s worth of salt.
Mark Foran
There is a statute that requires all state agency offices to be located within an area defined as the Capitol District. A number of agencies – notably the DOT and Motor Vehicles – have been able to circumvent the requirement by asserting that there isn’t sufficient office space to house them in the district.
I was involved in a state project back about twenty years ago that would have constructed a new state office building on the parking lot behind to the current SOB and adjacent to Capitol Avenue. A major problem involved how to provide replacement parking during construction. Ultimately, funding became problematic and DEP moved into their new HQ on Elm St, reducing the housing squeeze in the SOB.
Ken Krayeske
Former City Treasurer Kathleen Palm Devine wanted to use pension funds to rebuild brownstones and a school on the two empty lots. I wrote about that idea in 2004, and reprised it here. But I agree with Chris Brown – a moratorium on tear downs. Force conversions and build over asphalt.
http://hartfordinfo.org/issues/documents/economicdevelopment/yrplan_032510.asp
bob painter
There is a Commission (CCCC) co-chaired by the directors of OPM and DPW which is responsible for determining what happens to the physical aspects of the Capitol District. The present plan, created in 1960s, includes a platform extending easterly from the DPW building on which state office buildings would be situated as a part of consolidating many of the scattered offices. The ability to communicate more easily via the internet and the cost disrupted those plans. I, along with Bob Laporte and Sandy Parisky as members representing the community, advocated for updating this plan and to take into account the neighborhood’s proposals. The meeting minutes did not represent the discussion or those desires. Apparently the outcome of the meeting was determined beforehand. All of this is discouraging from the standpoint of the State having any commitment to development of the neighborhood beyond its own needs. Unfortunately the iQuilt plans for these parking lots leaves them in place as a venue for open air concerts. Not much comment on the noise such concerts would create in the neighborhood or why the present Bushnell Park bandstand area isn’t adequate for that purpose. Until commercial/market pressures are a part of future planning for these parking lots, I fear the direction of development in those parking lots will not represent any form of ‘new urbanism’.
Judy gordon
Bob is dead on on several points. The current members of the neighborhood have not been included in the discussion whether it be the CCC example Bob notes above, the iQuilt Connecticut Square plans (and as someone who lives in the neighborhood, an outdoor amphitheater would not be my wish for the sprawling lots) nor the Bushnell’s most recent vision. Plans for the neighborhood should reflect the vision of all – residents, small businesses, churches, non-profits, State offices, etc. – who call SoDo home.
Policies Should Encourage City Living | The 40 Year Plan
[…] prime example would be the empty parking lots between Capital Avenue and Buckingham Streets, written about by RealHartford.org. These should be brownstones with a park and a school, which […]
Tom Condon
Kerri,
Nice job. I have written about this on several occassions, coming to the same conclusion you did.
THE HARTFORD COURANT
2 / 6 – Sunday, March 12, 2006
HOLES IN THE FABRIC OF HARTFORD DOWNTOWN EXPANSES OF PARKING COULD BE PUT TO BETTER USE
Edition: STATEWIDE
Section: COMMENTARY
Page: C4
Type: COLUMN
Source: TOM CONDON Tom Condon is the editor of Place. He can be reached at tcondon@courant.com.
Illustration: ILLUSTRATION: (B&W), SMITH EDWARDS ARCHITECTS
PHOTO: (B&W), MARC-YVES REGIS III / THE HARTFORD COURANT
Caption: ILLUSTRATION: A RENDERING from Smith Edwards Architects of Hartford shows what development of the 6-acre state parking lot, seen from Elm Street along the south side of Bushnell Park, might look like.
PHOTO: THE 6-ACRE LOT behind the State Office Building on Capitol Avenue in Hartford offers tremendous possibility for smart urban development.
A woman named Ingrid Sandberg, who lives in Hartford, e-mailed me the other day to vent about downtown Hartford.
“Ever take a walk downtown? It’s depressing. Why? There are vast swaths of land with nothing but concrete on them. Surface parking as far as the eye can see … When I look around and see all the parking lots where there once were buildings and neighborhoods, I want to scream. Scream!”
I howl with her. The most pressing structural need in downtown Hartford is to fill in the blanks — build something on the many asphalt oases where once there were buildings. This has been talked about, ideas have been floated, renderings have been produced. The time has come to do something. In the enduring phrase of Mike Peters, show me a crane.
That unfortunate oxymoron “urban renewal,” along with the insatiable demands of the automobile, gutted parts of downtown Hartford, more so than many other cities.
In January, David Brussat wrote a piece in The Providence Journal comparing Hartford and Providence.
“Hartford has done a great job protecting its best old buildings. But Providence has done a great job of protecting its historical fabric — block after block of intact buildings of lesser nobility, which protect the visual impact of the best old buildings. Hartford destroyed most of its fabric decades ago, and appears uninterested in rebuilding it.”
That is well-put. Parts of downtown Hartford look like London in the late 1940s — the rubble’s been cleared but nothing’s been rebuilt. Hartford sacrificed way too much of its historic fabric. There is something inherently irrational about sacrificing a place for the ability to park there.
It looks bad, as Ingrid Sandberg correctly observes. It also deadens the pedestrian environment in many places, making distances seem longer than they really are. It gives the appearance of desolation and danger (though downtown is pretty safe). If officials and developers are on the ball, the time is right to reverse this self-inflicted wound and restore these streets that once made downtown Hartford the envy of the region, and I mean the Northeast.
First, there isn’t as much need for downtown surface parking. We have built two major marking garages in recent years, and now have a shuttle that goes to perimeter lots. Downtown could use two more garages — a small one around Union Place and a larger one near city hall — and city officials are working on it. Plus, the new busway and commuter rail proposals should in a few years further reduce the need for wasting space on cars.
Also, we now know there’s a market for downtown housing. The new apartment and condominium projects are filling up. But to keep this beneficent trend going, downtown residents need a better walking environment and a better mix of stores and services.
There are some amazing building sites downtown that are now being underused by the parking industry. (By the way, when did parking become an “industry”?) An architecture graduate student at the University of Hartford, a bright young woman from India, stopped by to see me a few months ago to talk about a hypothetical museum project for downtown Hartford. She had identified the site of the former Parkview Hilton as a prime building location, and didn’t understand why it was empty.
The 6-acre wasteland behind the State Office Building is another site where, if the parking were moved into a garage, some fabulous street footage could be made available for townhouses and other urban building forms.
The one city official who’s pushed to develop this area is treasurer Kathleen Palm, who at one point had a commitment from Gov. John Rowland to sell the state-owned land to the city for development. Rowland didn’t stay in office long enough to follow through, and Palm thus far been unable to reconstruct the arrangement with Gov. M Jodi Rell.
What also could help develop privately owned downtown land is a change in the tax system. A bill being proposed in this session of the General Assembly would allow towns of more than 80,000 residents to implement a two-tiered property tax system, in which land could be taxed at a higher rate than buildings.
This system, based on the thinking of economist Henry George, has been used with success in several cities in Pennsylvania. In Harrisburg, a city similar in many ways to Hartford, land is taxed at a rated six times higher than buildings. The tax system has been one factor in a $3.5 billion building boom in the city since the early 1980s. I can’t think of a good reason not to try it here.
In the current formula, Hartford buildings are taxed about three times more than the land on which they sit. Thus, the owner of the Hilton had an incentive to tear down the hotel. What if the incentives were reversed? I think there’d be a building there.
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