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New Haven Under a Microscope
The consultants came. They saw.
Now here's what they say we ought to do about downtown
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Business New Haven
3/6/2000
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Great minds have been pondering the future of downtown New Haven. Powerful forces have paid for their expansive, expensive musings, and they are not disposed toward surrendering control of the process.
Be very afraid.
The giant consulting firm of Ernst & Young was paid XXXXXX to produce a “retail strategic plan” for downtown, which was unveiled late last month. Baltimore consultant Sandra S. Hillman earned $100,000 for a “strategic plan for marketing New Haven” (marketing New Haven? Again?), which was released in January.
Both studies are chock full of creative ways to chart the future of downtown New Haven, which lacks a critical mass of retail attractions and, thus, hordes of suburban visitors with money to burn.
Downtown progress is further choked by the command-and-control mentality of city government, which shudders at the thought of actual flesh-and-blood capitalists buying downtown property to engage in some enterprise not part of the top-double-secret official “plan.”
But I digress. Consultant Michael Buckley, who calls himself a “stealth” New Havener, produced the Ernst & Young study and revealed it to a number of interested parties in late February. The picture he painted was one of a central business district at “a crucial transition point,” with traditional department-store retailing “fully evaporated” (so that's what happened to Macy's - it changed from a liquid to a gas) and the nearby proposed Long Wharf mall in “near-term development.”
If the traditional function of small cities like New Haven has shifted from retail hub to - to what? - Buckley asks the question, “How can New Haven capitalize on its inherent strengths, and can a concept-driven, well-executed strategic plan capture market support from new sources - including” the Long Wharf mall?
Buckley believes the answer is yes. He sees as strengths the Elm City's history and architecture, the relatively large numbers of people who live and work downtown and, of course, the presence of Yale. As a center of commerce, he asserts, it suffers largely from lack of retail density. For example, even downtown's most successful shopping districts, including upper Chapel Street and Broadway, have stores on only one side of the street.
He sees a commercial niche for downtown in what he calls “lifestyle” retail. He recommends the creation of a themed specialty retail district - some 500,000 square feet in all - to attract shoppers from places like Orange and Guilford with offerings distinct from those to be found on the Post Road.
Like what? Like a new Long Wharf Theatre on the site of the former Malley's building. Like an “urban entertainment center,” including a cinema, café and exercise club/spa, on the site of the Chapel Square Mall, which would also house a major new conference center targeting the academic market. Like a couple of “big box” retailers on the corner of Church and Chapel streets.
And that's not all. The Buckley plan incorporates a 20,000-square-foot public market for the mid-block bounded by Church, Center, Crown and Orange streets. Such an attraction might “focus on New England cuisine, farm-fresh foods and the delights of the gastronomic experience.”
The location of such a market would help to bootstrap the derelict storefronts on Crown Street between Orange and Church. For the former Chamberlain building at the corner of Crown and Orange Buckley envisions a 17,500-square-foot crafts bazaar.
Buckley also foresees great things for lower Chapel Street flowing from pedestrian traffic generated by a new Shore Line East commuter rail station planned for State Street, as well the new bus depot proposed for the Shartenberg site. He also recommends “filling in” both sides of the three blocks of Crown Street between Church and High with higher-density specialty retail.
And those are just the highlights.
The Buckley proposal requires quite a leap of imagination, but thus far reviews from business people have been mostly positive, despite the facts that: 1) there is no one presently standing in line to pay for all this; and 2) retailing really is to a significant extent a zero-sum proposition, and adding 1.5 million square feet of retail in New Haven (half a million downtown, plus a million for the mall) will, at best, redistribute dollars from places like the Boston Post Road in Orange and Milford.
Buckley acknowledges that his proposals go “out on a limb.” Still, he insists, “The market is here to do [these things].”
Who does he mean? The 40,000 people who live or work downtown. The 20,000 Yale students, faculty and staff. The half-million souls who visit one of the hospitals each year. The 1.8 million people who live within 30 miles of the Green. Even the 11 million shoppers who are supposed to shop at Long Wharf, if it is built. Buckley calculates a five-percent downtown “capture” of mall shoppers, which seems like a modest aspiration.
With the exception of the mall visitors, those people are already here; downtown just needs to pocket more of the dollars they spend already.
It can be done, he says, if only the five blocks bounded by York, State, Chapel and Crown streets can be “fixed.”
“The mall,” Buckley argues, “doesn't have to be a killer. [Business owners in] West Hartford panicked when Westfarms Mall was being built [in adjacent Farmington]. I recommended that they start planting trees in West Hartford center. Instead, they filled those spaces up with specialty retail. Today, West Hartford offers a viable village experience.”
Buckley is clear about the stakes involved in “fixing” downtown. It's essential to the long-term viability of the city's and region's economy that “We need to attract high-tech and knowledge workers to this environment. And those kinds of workers are very independent-minded. They [locate] where they want to be, not necessarily where you tell them to go.”
And those workers demand amenities both indoor and outdoor. They want nightlife and entertainment choices, but they also want a physical environment conducive to an active, healthful lifestyle. They want to be around other smart people. New Haven has many of these qualities already. It just needs more.
“You want these high-frontal-lobe folks walking around your downtown,” Buckley says.
The Sandra Hillman study, “A Strategic Plan for Marketing New Haven,” represents the fourth effort of its kind in the last decade. None of the first three ever achieved traction, due variously either to lack of financial commitment or lack of focus. (Are we marketing the city? The region? To people nearby? Far away?)
By contrast Bridgeport two years ago embarked on a major advertising initiative featuring TV spots that made the Park City look, as one columnist famously put it, “like a village in Vermont,” which most would agree Bridgeport is not.
Veracity aside, most marketing and PR people agree that Bridgeport's campaign has succeeded in beginning to turn around negative perceptions of the state's largest city.
Paid for by an unholy trinity of Yale, City Hall and something called the Regional Leadership Council (think of it as the real chamber board of directors; its members are CEOs of the largest area companies), the Hillman study posited that a successful marketing campaign would generate three outcomes:
n Create “fierce” local pride;
n Brand New Haven as a vibrant, desirable destination city;
n “Re-energize” the city by creating more activity and attracting more people downtown.
A successful effort, Hillman concluded would “diminish the gap between perception and reality providing New Haveners and their neighbors and opportunity to reconnect with downtown.”
The centerpiece of this initiative is a highly centralized, top-down marketing arm to be funded - and controlled - by the city, Yale and, through the Regional Leadership Council, the area's largest employers. This “consolidated marketing organization,” or CMO, would likely be steered by a nine-member board of directors representing the city, university and the largest companies.
Hillman spent enough time in New Haven to encounter plenty of healthy skepticism. “Perhaps the most critical and controversial element of the plan is the establishment of 'yet another' organization,” she wrote. Still, she asserts that her conclusion represents “a tough-minded practical analysis of marketing needs and available expertise.”
But wait a minute: Wasn't the two-year-old Town Green Special Services District sold to downtown property-owners as the entity that would, among other things, “market” downtown? “That's a good question,” says Jane Snaider, Town Green's president.
Both Hillman and Buckley agree that the core mission for downtown is “recapturing” the dollars spent on goods and services by residents of the richest ZIP codes within, say, a 20-mile radius of the Elm City. Many of these families lived in New Haven a generation or two ago, before the middle-class exodus of the 1960s and '70s.
What would bring them back for regular visits?
Shopping for things they can't get elsewhere, Buckley says, in an environment distinct from the plain-brown-wrapper Post Road boxes. But there need to be many more offerings, he cautions. Right now New Haven lacks retail “density.”
To Hillman, part of the answer is to have many more events, building on established offerings such as the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and summer jazz concerts on the Green. Events in public spaces in particular can energize downtown, Hillman argues, using “the Green as center stage and all of downtown as 'the set.'”
That might be a hard sell to the five-member board that controls the Green, collectively known as the Proprietors of the Common & Undivided Ground. With good reason concerned with their greensward and its remaining elm trees, they do not envision the Green as an everyday performance site.
That by itself need not be a kiss of death. A more trenchant question may be: We've been down his road before, with ample grass-roots buy-in (remember the “vision” process?) - and where the rubber met the road, nothing happened.
In this newest iteration of “marketing” New Haven, there's no pretense of grass-roots anything. Yale, City Hall and the biggest corporate shots will pay the freight and call the tune.
And who knows? If the will and the dollars can be summoned and the petty politics circumvented, perhaps it could happen here.
After all, it's a new century - even in New Haven. Sandy Hillman says so, calling us “a 21st century city set on the stage of the past.”
It's kinda catchy.
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