New Haven Register, Mary E. O’Leary, Register Topics Editor, 1/5/2005

NEW HAVEN — The city feels the numbers are on its side to justify action now, while opponents counter that all the options have yet to be examined.

The issue is the razing of the 30-year-old New Haven Coliseum, mothballed for two years, and proposed for demolition if the Board of Aldermen approves the $6 million needed to level it.

Tonight, the public gets to weigh in on the future of the "brutalist" structure designed by Kevin Roche, but never built to specifications.

The meeting is at 7 p.m. at City Hall, 165 Church St.

The Coliseum is a modernist building that architects like Robert Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, feel should be saved and reused, while others say was a design mistake three decades ago and remains one today.

Economic Development Administrator Henry Fernandez said the Coliseum has lost money since 1989, and despite an increase in events in 2000 while managed by SMG, hockey did not bring in the revenue lost to new venues hosting concerts.

When it closed in 2002, SMG was projecting a $1 million yearly operating loss for the next decade.

This was in addition to $10 million needed for basic plumbing, sewer, roof and other repairs; $30 million to bring it up to competitive standards.

Fernandez wants to see it come down to open the area for relocation of Long Wharf Theatre and a proposed hotel/conference center that would require public subsidies over a certain size.

He said he is not ready to commit to those subsidies at this point, and he would not say to whom the city has talked to about the private market component.

The Coliseum is one piece of a development puzzle that also includes relocation of the Gateway Community College one-block over on Church Street and continued negotiations with the Knights of Columbus for an office building with ground floor retail on George or South Orange streets.

Anstress Farwell of the New Haven Urban Design League said the city should put out a request for a proposal to bring in ideas for reuse of the arena.

"The best way is to have a competition," she said.

Until that is done, she feels city officials are operating in the dark, while Tom Holahan, a candidate for mayor, would like to see a nonbinding referendum in November 2005 on whether the arena should be knocked down.

Alan Organschi, who more than any other architect in the city has championed the reuse idea, is also wary of a city plan which has no commitments for the housing or hotel portions.

What he feels will be left for a long time after the demolition is a 4.5-acre surface parking lot where the Coliseum once stood, which is across from another parking lot that stretches for a block.

"It seems like a terrible waste to me. As a business owner in the 9th Square, it really frightens me to think that that’s what is going to be there. I think that is going to be really detrimental" to the area, he said.

Organschi feels the city’s neglect of the Coliseum has become a self-fulfilling prophecy allowing it to justify demolition of a structure it considers an eyesore.