Broadway's facelift: more than skin deep?

MICHAEL MARSLAND/OPA Bruce Alexander, BK '65, is the visionary behind Yale's broadway plans. COURTESY CITY OF NEW HAVEN The preliminary blueprint for Yale's new Broadway storefronts, on file at City Hall, shows Urban Outfitters (left), two small retailers with professional office above (middle), and a possible sit-down restaurant with outdoor seating in back (right). COURTESY CITY OF NEW HAVEN Yale says the new buildings will emulate this Broadway of the 1930s, with varied, two-story storefronts extending to the edge of the sidewalk. ANDREW HEID AND PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH

As Bruce Alexander, BK '65, Yale's vice president of New Haven affairs, envisions it, the Broadway of the future bustles with life. Yale students and employees drift in and out of new and old establishments. Suburbanites come for big-name shops like Urban Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, and Origins, but they stay for a meal at the Ivy Noodle Chinese café or a flick at York Square Cinemas.

The blueprints for Broadway's newest additions show three two-story, 1930s style structures. The rightmost of the ornate storefronts, once Cutler's record shop, is a restaurant, with outdoor dining in a back area bordering the Mory's walkway. In the middle, two retailers share the ground floor, and professionals occupy five suites of offices on the second level. The left side, which features Romanesque arches over its display windows and double doors, is an Urban Outfitters clothing shop.

Alexander, a prominent commercial developer before he came to Yale in 1998, thinks he can make Broadway thrive as a commercial and entertainment area. He believes he has a vision. Even those who think it's the wrong vision—and there are some—agree that he has one. It's a vision many other urban universities have had in the last few years: to make their part of the city feel like a college town. And if he's right, Broadway will look and feel very different in a few years.

Shuffling the cards

Over the summer, Yale put its Broadway properties in a blender and hit "frappé."

Store 24, Broadway Pizza, Y Haircutting, and Yale Travel were moved to other New Haven locations. Phil's Hair Styles and Team Computer were relocated to upstairs quarters. Au Bon Pain revamped its interior, and outside renovation is on the way.

Other changes are coming: Cutler's will move next door. Ivy Noodle will take the former Daily Caffe site next to Council Travel in November. Urban Outfitters will open after the new buildings are finished, in fall 2000.

And many uncertainties remain. Yale has offered Quality Wine the former Y Haircutting site on York Street, a smaller area than the current store. Owner Elliot Brause is deciding whether to move, sell, or close his store. On York Street, the University hopes to replace Ashley's, which closed in the spring due to mismanagement, with another ice cream or dessert shop, either a local operation or the Ben & Jerry's chain.

Plans for the two new buildings next to Urban Outfitters are still abstract: small retailers, offices, a sit-down restaurant. Construction will begin this winter on the three new structures, which are being designed primarily by Thomas Beeby, ARC '65, an adjunct professor and former Dean of the School of Architecture. The head designer at a prominent Chicago firm, Beeby's major pro-jects have included Chicago's award-winning Washington Library Center.

One block over, Chapel Street also saw changes over the summer: the addition of a Starbucks Coffee and a Blockbuster Video. Neither is on Yale property, but many residents and students nonetheless cite them as examples of how Yale has brought national retail chains to the campus area.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr., thinks Yale's plan can work. "The niching of the market to a strongly University-supported clientele makes sense," he said. About half of the area's 12,000 residents are dormitory dwellers, and many more are off-campus undergraduates, graduate students, and young professionals.

Won't you be my neighbor?

Starbucks knows how hard the anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate attitude is to fight. This summer, the Starbucks Foundation's ABC Book Drive collected 416 children's books at the company's three area locations (New Haven, Trumbull, and Orange) and donated them to underprivileged kids, but that doesn't stop local populations from seeing Starbucks as a money-grubbing intruder.

The locals have a point. An area's character comes from its unique offerings—individually owned businesses. But Alexander says the national chains that Yale has carefully selected are good for the area because they draw out-of-towners into the area with recognizable names. The local merchants, he claims, benefit from the increased shopping traffic.

That formula—national chains as "anchors," local retailers for character—is one Alexander made successful in many urban areas during his career as a developer. As senior vice president of The Rouse Company, he oversaw the rejuvenation of Miami's Bayside, New York's South Street Seaport, and New Orleans' Riverwalk, to name a few.

In Baltimore, Alexander created the Harborplace. Where there had once been a vacant, grassy area, he developed two glass pavilions housing 150,000 square feet of retail space—sidewalk cafés, restaurants, and a mix of national and local retailers. "This was in an area that attracted no shoppers, even though it was right on the harbor," he said. "It had more visitors than Disneyland in the first year it opened."

But Alexander acknowledges that his high-profile projects have all been in larger cities than New Haven, and many think Yale may be too ambitious in trying to turn Broadway into a major shopping destination.

Alexander Garvin, BR '62, ARC '67, belongs to this school of thought. A professor of urban planning and management in the Yale School of Architecture who teaches the undergraduate Study of the City course, Garvin thinks the Broadway redevelopment is a good idea whose time has come. "Anything that makes Broadway a livelier place will certainly make it attractive to students," he said. "But to suggest that it does anything for anyone else is not realistic."

Everybody's doing it

"Urban universities across the United States are recognizing that they must embrace and revitalize their surrounding communities or risk failure of their ed-ucational and research missions."

So reads "Priorities for Neighborhood Revitalization," a manifesto drafted by an organization of University of Pennsylvania faculty and staff. In the last five years, Penn, led by President Judith Rodin, a former Yale provost, has been working to rejuvenate its West Philadelphia neighborhood.

In addition to security and public-education measures, Penn hopes to attract retailers and to support local businesses. The university owns "an appreciable chunk of the retail space in the immediate neighborhood," said Tom Lussenhop, managing director of Penn's real estate holdings.

Penn's campus has a Barnes & Noble bookstore, an Urban Outfitters, a Gap, a Starbucks, and a XandO. Chains like these are interspersed with locally-owned shops and restaurants. Like Yale, Penn is moving quickly to shape its environment: in May, Penn broke ground on a new complex adjacent to campus. Hamilton Square will open in spring 2000 with a theater showing independent films, a supermarket, and a parking garage.

Penn's parallels with Yale are obvious. But unlike Yale, Penn has undergone huge institutional growth in the last four decades; much of the real estate it has acquired has been converted to academic use. Yale occu-pies a much smaller city than the other urban Ivies—Penn, Harvard, and Columbia—and each faces a unique situation.

Columbia, located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, owns about half of the buildings in its small strip, but zoning laws forbid the university to create a commercial district. Nor would it want to, said Bill Scott, Columbia's deputy vice president for institutional real estate. "We're trying to make a safe neighborhood here with the local services people need," he said. "We don't have anything people would travel to get."

Scott said he tries hard to keep local businesses as Columbia's retail tenants, charging them a fair rent and not introducing national competitors. The only national chain in a Columbia building is Kinko's. "We're on the other end of the continuum from Harvard Square," Scott said.

Harvard owns less than half of the commercial spaces in Harvard Square, a popular destination for decades which is currently the third largest tourist attraction in greater Boston. But Mary Power, senior director of community relations, acknowledges that Harvard is far from uncontroversial. The Harvard Square Defense Fund has battled in past years to maintain the area's uniqueness, even while Barnes & Noble has taken over the Harvard Coop and chains like Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap, and Starbucks have moved in.

Despite the different situations of the Ivy schools, they participate in the same trend, said Lussenhop, who has done public-private partnership work including the redevelopment of Carnegie Hall and the Newark, N.J., arts center.

"Urban, large, sophisticated research and teaching universities have realized that if they are to have an attractive, safe campus area, they must involve themselves in making that happen," he said. "They can no longer rely on the state or local government to assure that the city survives as a viable, vibrant environment."

Yale President Richard Levin, GRD '74, is largely credited with awakening a slumbering institution to the need for change. Cynics call his policy autocratic med-dling. Supporters call it community involvement.

Bumps in the road

The path to Broadway success won't be smooth for Yale. Some local merchants believe the University will charge its local tenants rents only national operations can afford, or that it will bring in competing chains to steal their clientele.

Some shops can take competitive pressure. Tyco has seen Kinko's come and go, and Cutler's outlasted Strawberry's and Sam Goody when each tried to enter the market further downtown. Others can't—like the Daily Caffe, which lost its cornered market with the arrival of XandO and Willoughby's and closed a year ago, or like Breugger's Bagels, a national chain that closed its Broadway location last year, ceding the market to Au Bon Pain.

Some observers, like Garvin, wonder how much shopping New Haven can support. "New Haven's not big enough to have a thriving downtown," Garvin said. But Alexander believes he can channel traffic from the Audobon arts district, the Church Street banking district, and the Chapel Street boutiques to Broadway by offering something different while overlapping with other areas' markets.

Alexander also believes in the proposed mall at Long Wharf, which is slated to begin construction next year at the intersection of interstates 91 and 95 if it's approved. He agrees with DeStefano, who believes, "Any project that's going to generate $7 million in taxes and 3,000 new jobs is a good thing." The mayor thinks the proposed mall, with its highly visible highway location, would improve the city's image and motivate shoppers to explore the Elm City.

But many local merchants think the proposed mall would actually draw shoppers away from Broadway with big-name stores and free parking. Trailblazer owner Chris Howe put up a sign in his New Haven store and circulated a petition to protest the mall. "[Mall shoppers] won't be coming into New Haven," Trailblazer salesperson Tony Holloway said. "They'll get back on the highway when they're done shopping and go back home."

Another possible quagmire for Yale is the parking issue. With the 28,000 square feet of the three new storefronts, city code requires 172 parking spaces. However, a Yale-commissioned study of short-term parking found that most blocks always had one or two vacant spots, and that off-street lots were never more than 78 percent full. On this evidence, the city gave Yale an exception to the parking regulation.

Elliot Brause, whose grandfather opened Quality Wine in 1934, doesn't think the street spaces will be enough if Broad-way traffic increases. "If someone drives to New Haven to check out Broadway, they're not going to see any parking spaces," he said. "They'll drive around the block a second time, maybe a third. Then they'll give up and go home."

But the mayor takes such an idea in stride. "You hope to have some degree of parking problems," DeStefano said. "It's a sign of health in a city."

Doing well by doing good

Bruce Alexander thinks Yale can make money and improve New Haven simultaneously. "Our purchases of commercial real estate have been intended to create a vital retail experience not only for students, but for the community at large," he said. "We have the capital and the wherewithal to help create a stable retail environment."

They're big words for a big University.

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