100 Years Later, A Vision Lives On

Imagine stepping out of the New Haven train station after a long journey by rail. A large open plaza greets you outside the doors. As you look north, a wide boulevard beckons you to the heart of the city, where another public square awaits.

This unfulfilled vision of New Haven s spelled out in a landmark 1910 plan for the city drafted by two leading urban planners of the day, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and Cass Gilbert. That document turns 100 this year, and it continues to inspire dreams and planning.

City Hall intern David Eisenman (pictured) has been coming across a century’s worth of ideas like the proposed plaza—some realized, some not—as he prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Olmsted-Gilbert plan. A look back shows at least one urban design problem has persisted in New Haven through the ages: how to connect the train station to downtown.

In 1910, when Olmsted and Gilbert issued their comprehensive plan for New Haven, the 138-page document featured an ambitious plan to construct a wide boulevard from the train station to a new public plaza to be built at the junction of Temple Street and Congress Avenue. The plan would have created a bold new gateway to the downtown for rail passengers coming to New Haven.

A hundred years later, plans are underway for a different new urban boulevard, to replace what is now the Rt. 34 corridor. The project is intended in part to reconnect downtown to the area around the train station. In a case of history repeating itself, the heart of that proposal, dubbed Downtown Crossing, would rise exactly where planners envisioned the new public plaza a century ago.

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