A Second Look

You know that mammoth rust-colored arena and garage hovering over I-91 and I-95 in downtown New Haven?

You might have noticed that it's still there.

Alan Organschi, a 42-year-old architect, notices that the building is still there. He works a block away. He sees it every day. He wants it to stay there, but become something new.

The building--the Veterans Memorial Coliseum--isn't supposed to be there anymore. The city closed it in mid-2002 and planned to tear it down ASAP. But a year and a half later, it's no closer to demolition than it was back then; the city's still waiting for the state money (originally estimated at $10 million, now $6.5 million) to tear it town. The Rowland administration, which needs to put the matter on the agenda on the State Bond Commission, but which isn't fond of New Haven's mayor, hasn't budged. New Haven's state legislators haven't budged him.

The Coliseum's demise is still considered a foregone conclusion. New Haven learned, through a series of failures, that pro hockey doesn't succeed here. Bridgeport's new Harbor Yard arena and the Mohegan Sun casino have rendered the Coliseum unable to compete for the rock concerts that used to pay the bills. Plus, it's an ugly scar, a symbol of the windowless Godzillas that replaced human-scale apartments and shops during mid-20th-century urban renewal. Only a small band of mostly suburban hockey fans (whose towns would never help pay to keep the money-losing Coliseum afloat) continues agitating to preserve the Coliseum as is.

But as the empty, abandoned hulk stretches out its stay on death row, a third view has begun gaining currency. Architects call it "adaptive reuse."

Organschi has spent time exploring this view. He'd like to see the Coliseum saved from the wrecking ball but completely reworked for a host of different uses.

The idea entails finding ways to work with existing buildings rather than repeating New Haven's historic mistakes of just tearing buildings down and starting over.

Organschi knows about reuse. His firm knocked out walls and put in staircases to build its offices in an old Crown Street warehouse. Next door a musician is turning an old firehouse into a combination coffee bar, recording studio, performance space and private apartment.

Like others in town, Organschi says, he used to look at the Coliseum and see "this megastructural monster that destroyed the neighborhood" and "was falling down anyway." So why mourn?

Then he started looking at it more. He noticed the light streaming through the opening between the rooftop garage and the arena. He fixed on the spiral garage ramps. "I started appreciating it," says Organschi, who also teaches at Yale's School of Architecture.

He started thinking. About how the city never completed the Coliseum plan to include street-level stores. About how it never built the garage right. About how, even half-closed, the garage provides needed parking for a crowded, reviving neighborhood.

He started thinking about the city's plan to raze the structure and put a new hotel in its place, connected to an outdoor plaza bookended by apartment buildings and shops, with a skating rink in the middle ("Tree Walls & Sky Wallpaper," Advocate , April 10, 2003). That sounded generic to Organschi. It sounded like an effort to create a new scene where an existing facility already could do that, if changed to address the city's new market realities.

And he thought about all the pollution and debris that tearing down such a massive structure would create.

Instead of razing the Coliseum, Organschi imagined a health club and outdoor running track, swimming pool and basketball court on the roof.

He imagined the 11,000-seat sports arena shrunk by more than half, for use by college teams and smaller concert acts; the upper decks converted to a first-run cineplex; a convention center that connected to an addition on the State Street side, opposite the Knights of Columbus Museum.

He imagined closing off Orange Street where it runs under the Coliseum garage and replacing it with a grass plaza that runs all the way to the old Malley's block on Church Street. He pictured Long Wharf Theatre going there (the same spot imagined by proponents of tearing down the Coliseum, too), next to an amphitheater for outdoor movies and concerts.

He imagined finishing architect Kevin Roche's original Coliseum plan by putting storefronts on the now faceless, imposing concrete street level.

"The point of this isn't to say there's one solution," he says. Rather, the idea is to show people the possibilities.

O rganschi did that by putting together a detailed model for a new Coliseum complex. He showed it at an Arts & Ideas forum. Now others are asking to see the slides as they re-examine the reality of a beached elephant by the highway that was supposed to be hauled out of town, like the circus, by now.

The renewed interest coincides with new arguments by some local preservationists that even if the Coliseum began as a bad idea, it has now become a major part of a city's landscape. Therefore, they argue, tearing it down rather than preserving it in some form, would destroy an essential part of New Haven's history and character.

Groups concerned with the issue include the Alliance for Architecture and the New Haven Urban Design League, an advocacy group dedicated to "good government, good planning, and good development." The League met with City Hall last week for a downtown update. Its board plans to discuss the issue in March. "People are regathering their attention to this," says League President Anstress Farwell. She suggests the city made a "faulty decision" because it failed to include public input.

Of course there's another view of how to deal with historical mistakes: undo them and put something better in their place.

That's City Hall's view. It's pressing hard to shake loose the state bond money to level the Coliseum and get started replacing it with a hotel.

"To the extent that it is an architectural landmark," says Henry Fernandez, the city's economic development chief, "it is a landmark to architectural failure." New Havens doomed Coliseum hasnt come down yet. That has some people thinking:

Instead of demolishing it or keeping it as is, why not turn it into something new?