The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
BRIGHTER LIGHTS; BIG CITY DRAW
Temple garage brightening up; Rudolph building scorned and loved
NEWHAVEN — The Temple Street Garage, a two-blocklong concrete hulk in the middle of downtown, has had a reputation as a dark, uninviting, obtrusive structure, scorned by many who avoid entering its shadowy spaces.
Others hail the modernist architect, Paul Rudolph, then chairman of Yale University’s Department of Architecture, as having designed a prosaic necessity of urban life as a living work of art in the Brutalist style. The garage was built in 1961.
While nothing can be done about its low ceilings — just 6 feet, 8 inches where the concrete extends from the outside columns — the garage soon will have its yellowish sodium lights replaced with bright, white LED lamps, which will give the garage a more inviting look with a greater feeling of safety, say New Haven Parking Authority officials.
The Temple Street sidewalk underneath the garage already has had its overhead lamps upgraded, so that the light is brighter and more uniform.
“Lighting to me in a parking garage is extremely important,” said Paul Staniewicz, chief engineer for Park New Haven, as the parking authority is also known. “It’s one of the most paramount issues that we have. If your parking garage has good lighting and elevators that work, people are happy.”
Staniewicz has worked for the parking authority since 1979, before the highpressure sodium lights were installed in 2000. Back then, the lights were brighter, but they have dimmed over time, he said.
There are experimental LED lights installed at the south end of Level 4, overlooking Route 34, glowing with three different color temperatures. The middle one — not too yellow and warm, not too blue and cold — will be installed in Temple Street, Crown Street and the Temple Medical garages, Staniewicz said. It’s the same type of light that was installed last year in the Union Station garage, Staniewicz said.
Inside a concrete garage, the color of the light is subtle but critical. “If you put too much blue in it, it looks cold and clammy,” Staniewicz said. The amount of glare is also important, since the lights are low enough to be seen by drivers as they search for a parking space.
Doug Hausladen, director of the city Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking and acting director of the parking authority, said the staff looked for “a more focused, more intentional lighting scheme” to make the garage more friendly to parkers downtown.
“We know that the Crown Street Garage is more loved” because it’s more brightly lit, Hausladen said.
Both garages are part of the program offering free parking after 4 p.m. for patrons of more than 25 restaurants.
In that program, “Crown has far higher participation because of its proximity” to the restaurants, said Brian Seholm, chief financial officer for the parking authority. In the year that ended June 30, 32,747 parkers at Crown Street took advantage of the free parking, and 4,020 at Temple Street, which was a decline from 4,991 the previous year. It’s difficult to know how much of a difference the proximity to restaurants or the perception of safety makes in parkers’ decisions.
“The restaurants have asserted that these are parkers that would not otherwise have come to New Haven,” Seholm said. While otherwise empty spaces in the garages are filled, diners avoid the $9 evening flat rate at Crown Street or $8 at Temple Street.
‘A very safe garage’
Park New Haven’s garages and lots had few incidents of breakins or thefts and no assaults last year, according to Sammy Parry, chief operating officer of Park New Haven, and Lt. Sean Maher, the New Haven police district manager for downtown and Wooster Square.
“Temple Street Garage is a very safe garage with minimal incident[s] regarding vehicle breakins and other crime related matters,” Parry said in an email. In the year that ended June 30, in all of the parking authority’s seven garages and 22 lots, there were just 30 breakins and one stolen car. There were also three stolen bicycles or mopeds at Union Station, according to figures supplied by Parry.
Maher said in an email, “I do not recall any incidents this year. The parking authority does an excellent job at providing a safe environment in their parking lots/ garages.” He said the parking authority’s security guards are supplemented by police patrols.
People parking at Temple Street on Thursday said the brighter lights would be an improvement. “It feels a little dark sometimes … a little scary,” said Shelly Nestico of Guilford. “Better lighting would help. Having more security and elevators fixed more regularly” would also improve the parking experience, she said.
“I haven’t parked here in years but it’s better than it was,” said Donna Hunt of Branford. And John Fulton of West Haven said he liked the garage but thought new lights “will be an improvement.” “Because of the lights, it’s like a dim setting, but I have no problems,” he said.
In addition to the new LED lights, Staniewicz said colored lights are planned to light up the small arches that line the Temple Street side on the upper levels and on the columns on the street level.
A brightly lit sidewalk
Staniewicz is particularly proud of the overhead lights that illuminate the sidewalk between Crown and George streets. “I think this is the best lit sidewalk in town. It’s so brightly lit. It’s so nice,” he said.
He said restaurant owners on the block are “delighted” with the new lighting. The lamps, which shine both up and down, casting a glow on the concrete wall, replaced spotlights that created alternating bright spots and shadows.
“These are close enough with the spacing and the uniformity is so outstanding,” Staniewicz said. “It’s the shadows that get people feeling more uncomfortable.”
“We really had a breakthrough when we started thinking of the structure the way Paul Rudolph [thought] of it,” Hausladen said. “We started highlighting from the garage rather than hiding from the garage.”
Among the garage’s fans is architect Duo Dickinson of Madison, now a columnist for Hearst Connecticut Media, who called it “probably my favorite building in New Haven” even though there are “reasons to dislike it because it is different.”
Dickinson said the building displays “extreme hand-craftedness” and that Rudolph added “handdrawn personal touches” to a structure that “is literally like a gigantic sculpture [that] actually celebrates concrete.”
Referring to the curved walls and columns, he said, “You can really tell by the way they’re formed that human hands touched it.” Dickinson described the garage as a sculpture with lines, voids, bulges and “sinuous shapes” that are “incredibly organic and botanic.”
Dickinson also said that in order to pack in as many cars as possible — it holds 2,600 — “there is a perception, and I don’t think it is a bad one … It is … threedimensionally about as tight as it can be.”
The late Elizabeth Mills Brown, an architectural historian and preservationist, also was a fan. In her classic 1976 book “New Haven: A Guide to Architecture and Urban Design,” she wrote, “Despite immense length, these subtly rounded surfaces, broken lines, and matte shadows give the building a suppleness and rhythm that fit it to the city street.”
The New Haven Preservation Trust, on its website celebrating modern architecture, said the garage “expressed the excitement of the automobile age by extending the garage design as a megastructure the full 700foot length of two city blocks. Leaping over a street to form a gateway structure, the concrete modeled into freeform curved sculptural forms giving expression to the sense of motion implicit in the freedom of the automobile.”