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Silver Lining
At the center of the state, Meriden envisions a new city center
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Business New Haven
7/7/2003
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Almost exactly a year ago, at a packed Augusta Curtis Cultural Center press conference, city officials in Meriden unveiled a blueprint for a future that might be, and even could be.
But will it be?
Much like larger urban neighbors Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven, the Silver City has endured the seemingly inevitable cycle of rapid Victorian-era growth and prosperity based on manufacturing prowess, followed by gradual decline and depopulation as manufacturing companies emigrated in pursuit of cheaper labor.
Larger Connecticut cities have sought to reverse the ravages of time and demography by developing magic-bullet projects to revive battered downtowns - vastly expensive deus ex machina solutions such as Hartford's $700 million Adriaen's Landing, or New Haven's now abandoned $500 million Long Wharf mall project.
Perhaps because it's a bit smaller (2000 population: 58,244), or perhaps a bit smarter, Meriden's movers and shakers think they can give their downtown a total body makeover for a lot less - $130 million, give or take. Of course, in a fiscal landscape that features a state government effectively panhandling for quarters, the practical difference between $130 million and $700 million may be wholly academic.
Nevertheless, the Silver City's golden blueprint probably earns points for the practicality of its scope and scale, and may well benefit from relatively solid buy-in on the part of the business and political communities.
On the big-picture canvas, while Hartford's current and New Haven's recent plans to jump-start their downtowns rely on injecting specific businesses (largely retail) into their respective city centers, the Meriden plan seeks to improve and enhance downtown's infrastructure as a precursor to actual business recruitment.
Thus the City Center Initiative seeks to address four infrastructure issues critical to downtown business development:
o Unnecessary barriers - both physical and psychological - to pedestrian and vehicular circulation, both within downtown but also into and out of the city center;
o Downtown's chronic flooding problem, which has existed for decades;
o Lack of an identifiable center-city icon that helps to define downtown, to create a sense of place, a la New Haven's Green:
o Creating an engine of substantial economic stimulus that is sustainable - in this case, an arts district along West Main Street that would include, among other attractions, a community playhouse.
Overall, the plan, according to an executive summary prepared by the BL Companies, which drafted the initial prospectus, "creates an environment that will maximize the opportunity for new business, and will attract a growing, diverse group of people to the city center to enjoy many of life's activities."
These might include shopping, dining out, working, residing, recreating and attending cultural events in a safe and attractive environment.
If this core environment can be made to succeed, the BL summary asserts, "its vitality and success will naturally grow to adjacent neighborhoods, and contribute to higher quality of life for the entire city.
The genesis of the project dates back 30 months or so to when Castle Bank & Trust CEO Lawrence M. McGoldrick, who is also chairman of the Meriden Economic Development Corp. (MEDCO) and a lifelong Meriden resident, invited representatives of the city, chamber of commerce, Meriden Economic Resources Group (MERG) and other downtown stakeholders to regular brainstorming luncheon meetings to see if an overarching vision might emerge from few-holds-barred discussions.
What emerged over time from the meetings was a sweeping redevelopment plan to transform more than 40 acres off Interstate 691, where the Meriden Hub and Mills Memorial Apartments now stand, into mixture of offices and shopping centers along a rerouted State Street. The plan calls for $40 million in public money and $90 million in private investment.
"You anticipate state and federal participation in these public projects because the magnitude is so great that local communities can't [afford to pay for them]," explains project director Wayne D'Amico, working under contract to MERG.
Since it was first unveiled in July, the initiative has won support from Mayor Mark D. Benigni and a majority of the City Council. Gov. John G. Rowland allocated $250,000 in state money for a more comprehensive plan than the initial BL study. That money is expected to be released by the state by the end of this month
The centerpiece of the City Center Initiative is a "conceptual" commercial development and new Town Green encompassing some 46 acres.
Today the target geography is home to a number of obsolete and/or underperforming commercial properties as well as the Mills Apartments, a high-rise, low-income housing project along with another high-density garden-style apartment complex under a combination of private and public ownership. Efforts by the city to demolish the Mills complex have been in play for a half-dozen years.
Under the City Center Initiative, private businesses, office buildings and mid-income apartments would replace those buildings, along with a park.
At the epicenter of the project is the 14-acre Meriden Hub, once home to Canberra Industries, that sits squarely on the Harbor Brook flood plain. The 100,000-square-foot building is the city's signature white elephant. Having lost its last major tenant, RFS Cablewave, the property sits athwart any downtown redevelopment scheme.
Among other objectives, redeveloping this area would improve access into and out of downtown by reconfiguring a historically confusing and ineffectual road system
As for I-691, which bisects Meriden's downtown, D'Amico asks, "Is it an asset or a detriment? Westfield Shoppingtown [the former Meriden Square Mall] is right up here" - D'Amico points to a map - "on Lewis Avenue. Is that an asset or not? If it's an asset, how can we benefit from it?"
One way to leverage that potential asset is to create a commercial business link between the mall and surrounding commercial uses with the new commercial center and provide clear, direct regional access to the city center from I-691.
Sited between State, Main, Pratt and Camp streets, the new commercial center would include a transportation center in the historic Colony Street Post Office building and provide multiple venues for offices, retail and commercial uses.
He adds that uses such as a possible industrial incubator or higher-education uses would likewise be consistent with the project, and would benefit greatly from improved traffic circulation in the downtown area.
Specifically, the proposed Cook Avenue campus uses the former medical office and Veterans Memorial Medical Center properties to create a campus environment for a higher-education facility or a technical school.
While other landlocked cities dream waterfront dreams, in downtown Meriden, water is Public Enemy No. 1.
That's because the innocently named Harbor Brook and its tributaries frequently overflow, flooding much of Meriden's central business district.
Newly configured and redesigned roads and a reconstructed waterway are intended to relieve that chronic problem - and to make room for a visual and social signature for the Silver City - a new Meriden Green.
"If you're going to have an area that defines the identity of a downtown, you need a sense of place and focus that becomes [over time] the hub of activity in a community," says D'Amico.
The solution? "When you [reconfigure] the area for traffic and flood, there's a chunk of land left over," he adds. "What do you do with it? Let's use it to create a beautiful park - the Green that never existed."
The most daunting objective of all is course that Holy Grail of dying New England urban areas: "sustainable" economic growth.
The plan's recommendation is to create a hybrid of retail and so-called lifestyle attractions to generate activity outside of 9 to 5 o'clock on weekdays. "It brings the bodies, and it brings the money," observes D'Amico. That includes up-front private-sector commitment dollars, he believes.
"Retailers can commit to a project longer in advance than anyone else in the private sector," he says. "They can go four or five years out on a commitment. How long does it take to do projects like this? Three, four, five years.
"So if you can do a quality, urban-sensitive design lifestyle/retail component along with, say, some office component - that's an ideal scenario that brings money to the table to help finance or break even the public investment."
Ah, there's the rub. So where would the City Center Initiative's boosters find $130 million - and just how likely is it that they will during an era when budget woes trickle down from Hartford to distressed municipalities.
Of that sum, the plan envisions $40 million in public (mostly state) investment, with the remaining $90 million to be raised in the private sector. "You don't do the public [financing] until you have the commitment from the private [sector]," D'Amico explains.
"We're not doing an Adriaen's Landing - $700 million. We've actually created something that will have a long-term impact on the growth of the community," he says.
Robert Landino, president of BL Companies, which created the master plan, is sanguine about what it may take to get the project off the drawing board at a time when state government is forced to do more with less.
"Because of the economic condition of government at the current time," he says, "funds are limited. And until they become more available it will be difficult for a city like Meriden to attract a large amount of private investment without a public initiative that is comparable to some of the investments that have occurred in cities like New Haven, Waterbury and Hartford over the last six to eight years."
Because of that, Landino believes that although the project is "likely to happen, it may take longer than we originally anticipated.
Nevertheless, community buy-in to the plan has attained a high level of consensus. To date the master plan has been endorsed by the Meriden chamber, MEDCO, MERG, the city's arts council, City Council and mayor's office.
"For the first time in recent Meriden history, virtually every public agency has supported the completion of the original investigation," says Landino.
One potential fly in the ointment is an alternate downtown redevelopment plan released six weeks after the City Center Initiative unveiling by Meriden developer Joseph F. Carabetta. Carabetta's plan would revitalize the current site of the Meriden Hub, the Mills Memorial Apartments and a neighborhood along Twiss Street
Part of the city's plan would include the demolition of Mills Memorial Apartments, the Meriden Hub and Parkside Apartments, a private development owned by the Carabetta Management Co.
"There will always be alternative opinions, and Mr. Carabetta has one," says Landino. "From our perspective we're not trying to dictate or mandate a direction, but rather lay out a road map and let the city ultimately decide what's in its best interests."
As home of the International Silver Co., the world's largest silver manufacturer, Meriden earned its nickname in the 90-year span between the Civil War and World War II. And its renown traveled far beyond Connecticut: In 1944, for example, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt cited Meriden as "The Nation's Ideal War Community" in recognition of its prodigious manufacturing output, skilled labor force and can-do attitude that embodied the qualities that were winning the war against imperialism in Europe and Japan.
After the war the Silver City endured the same kinds of body blows borne by other Northeastern city - suburban sprawl, the defection of manufacturing jobs, neglect, fires, demolition.
Just a handful of the grand structures that were once the city's signature still exist, along North Colony Street, Washington Heights, Griswold Street and elsewhere. To reclaim a measure of its past glory Meriden must forge a new and different kind of urban model.
In 2006 Meriden will celebrate its bicentennial. And a lot of people in the business community here think that progress toward the goals of the City Center Initiative might be one of the best birthday gifts the city could give itself.
Will a community that has always welcomed innovators and inventors and dreamers dare to dream big once more?
"If we can get the majority of this project moving forward we will be able to position Meriden's city center as a regional magnet," says chief executive Benigni. "The initiative is comprehensive: It addresses traffic, housing and flooding issues and creates business and economic opportunity, which will help to make the center city a destination.
"Now," adds Benigni, "it's time for us to secure state and federal dollars to complete the planning process and move this plan from paper to reality."
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