Jason Farago, The New Haven Advocate, December 2, 2004

The last event hosted at the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum was an edition of World Wrestling Entertainment's "Tour of Defiance," on August 26, 2002. A few weeks later, on the floor of the arena, the owners of the site sold off seats, signage, refrigerators and a pair of Zambonis to the highest bidder, hauling in as much cash as possible to pay down a projected deficit of $1.6 million. After that, the Coliseum was locked. It has not yet been demolished, but it has already been disemboweled.

Sooner or later, the Coliseum will go down in a huge blast. One that will cost the city $6 million. In its place, the mayor and his planners hope, will be a park, a row of shops and residences, the new home of the Long Wharf Theatre and--perhaps, down the road--a hotel and conference center. Add to this the relocation and consolidation of Gateway Community College on the sites of the former Macy's and Malley's department stores, plus a possible new building for the Knights of Columbus, and you have the blueprint for the biggest transformation of downtown New Haven since the development of the Ninth Square district in the '90s.

The wails of protest--with any redevelopment scheme, there is protest--have come in several decibel levels. Loudest and shrillest are those New Haven residents unequivocally opposed to the destruction of the Coliseum, who have formed several organizations and plastered the city with posters and stickers protesting the impending demolition--and, at the same time, thanking a mysteriously unidentified "John." A little less loud are the several architectural firms, local as well as foreign, who would prefer to see the Coliseum redeveloped and reconstituted, creating a mixed-used site with a smaller auditorium. Then come the community advocates, who welcome the demolition but worry about the parceling out of spaces, the percentage of taxable revenue, the daily functioning of the area.

Mayor John DeStefano and his people, including Herbert S. Newman and Partners, the architectural firm they hired, are a bit surprised--or feign to be--that such a brouhaha has arisen from their plan.

It is too early to tell what their proposed neighborhood would look like upon completion. No buildings have yet been designed. And the plan is in flux, as evidenced by the city's recent willingness to reconsider the location of the Long Wharf to make space for a second Knights of Columbus tower. But the architectural and urban ramifications of the Gateway-Long Wharf plan are becoming clearer and clearer: They point toward a future that is pretty but lifeless. The plan is stultifying, calling for the demolition of an oversized building and replacing it with something both undersized and underwhelming.

Can we start with the one thing that the most people agree on? The relocation and unification of Gateway Community College has been a long time coming, and the school will be a welcome addition to downtown. The division of Gateway into two campuses, one down on Sargent Drive and the other in North Haven, has caused numerous problems and has kept the college from establishing any sort of identity. With the construction of a single facility, Gateway can consolidate its resources and become a major force in the community. And while several critics have objected to the siting of the new college building on economic grounds, protesting that the real estate could be better used for offices and other tax-generating spaces, it's important to remember that under the circumstances this represents the best long-term opportunity for the regeneration of New Haven. Gateway can serve as a sort of engine. If it is truly valued--if, that is, New Haven wants to demonstrate that its commitment to higher education extends beyond Yale--then it deserves a prominent location and a prominent architect to design it.

In the well-meaning Newman plan, Gateway has been positioned at the head of a long village square. And this takes us straight to the heart of the controversy surrounding the Coliseum and its destruction. For while Gateway could possibly relocate without the Coliseum's demolition, the rest of the plan depends on the wrecking ball.

On Oct. 16, the Alliance for Architecture held a symposium at the New Haven Colony Historical Society, presenting six viewpoints on the Coliseum, its history, and its future (or lack thereof). Outside, someone had installed an exceedingly weird poster of a gargantuan John DeStefano, hovering menacingly above the abandoned building and plucking a screaming nymphet out of its cantilevered parking garage (an image cribbed from the Sept. 16 Advocate ). Those wanting to sign petitions had several to choose from: one to stop the demolition, one to keep New Haven from using tax dollars to do it, one to force a dialogue with the mayor's office.

But among the symposium participants, one thing was clear: Although some favored demolition and others reconstitution, nobody believed that the Coliseum was operable as is. It operated at a constantly growing deficit. Its valuable ground-level real estate went to parking. Economically and architecturally, the Coliseum is a sinkhole.

Is this enough of a reason to demolish it? Several participants suggested otherwise.

One speaker floated the idea that the building, the work of the talented Irish architect Kevin Roche, should be seen as a landmark, an architectural masterpiece, worthy of preservation despite its failures. But considering that the building was never completed as Roche intended, that he has designed far superior buildings, including the Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that the architect himself has refused to speak out on behalf of his baby, this argument rings rather hollow.

What is more, one can hardly believe that the visceral reaction so many New Haven area residents have had to the impending destruction has to do with a fondness for late Brutalism. Perhaps it is the implied exchange of the "mass" culture of the Coliseum for the "high" culture of the Long Wharf that is at issue. Or perhaps it's that for many New Haven residents, the Coliseum has a particular resonance, a fondness that goes beyond bricks and mortar to something more ethereal, more nostalgic. We could even consider it a lieu de mémoire (the term used by the French historian Pierre Nora to describe a place that has been transformed from a site to a sign, from extra-referential to self-referential).

It would be a mistake, however, to maintain the Coliseum solely for the memories it affords. The production of nostalgia is not the role of the city, but of the theme park.

Reconstitution, then? This was the proposal of several symposium participants, including architect Alan Organschi, whose plan of adaptive reuse would complete and then transform Roche's building: shrinking the stadium, adding a movie theater, renting space to retail stores. For those who cherish the Coliseum, this is an intriguing solution--but ultimately it is not the best one.

What irks me about the Coliseum is its failed bigness, its inability to justify its size and its scale. While every city needs its monuments, to be sure--and let us not forget that the Coliseum is dedicated to the nation's veterans--it also needs sites for risk, for unplanned and uncontrolled interaction. The Coliseum does not afford that now, and it will not in any reconstituted form. It dictates; it refuses opportunities. This is fine for a suburban shopping mall or a prison, but it cannot be the centerpiece of a successful urban design. A space that affords no choices, no risk, is not an urban space.

So the Coliseum is going to come down. In its place the city has proposed the new home of the Long Wharf, some commercial and residential development along George Street, and at last a hotel and conference center on the rounded block formed by Orange, George, State and Frontage streets.

The city's program is interesting. The relocation of Long Wharf will increase attendance at the theater and help spur the local economy: Some 70 percent of each night's spectators have a meal at a local restaurant before the performance. The residential additions will encourage citizens to move back from the suburbs. The hotel and conference center seem more dubious, although the city insists that they will not be built with public monies.

Much, much more worrisome is the layout. In this unimaginative parceling out of spaces, a long piazza, desperate to be classed up with the designation "European-style," will run from the main entrance of Gateway down to the projected hotel. A few stores and residences will line one side; the Long Wharf and the Knights of Columbus building will flank the other. The kicker? An ice skating rink, smack dab in the middle. It is a classic product of New Urbanism, the school of urban design that insists upon rigid codes to limit the possibilities of architects and developers and create manicured, perfected spaces. Whether these spaces are vibrant or pleasurable is another question, left for another day.

In his presentation at the Alliance for Architecture conference, Yale political science professor Douglas Rae, author of City , the definitive history of New Haven's planning mistakes, contrasted "hard-edge" and "soft-edge" architecture. The former is rigid, planned, organized from the top down; the latter is flexible, spontaneous, demotic. The proposed plan is hard-edged in the extreme. Options are systematically reduced, choices rendered unnecessary. Social organization is controlled: Individual New Haven residents will have no way to create their own community, no investment in the spaces they are given. It reminds me of nothing more than the old Coliseum, a dictated urbanity--or non-urbanity, as the case may be.

I n a 1999 discussion with New Urbanism guru Andrés Duany, the architect Rem Koolhaas criticized the degradation of the city that he foresaw in the plans of the New Urbanists. "The whole notion of the unpredictable, the whole notion of choice, is being systematically eliminated," Koolhaas said. Risk, the fundamental element of urbanity, is being cast aside in favor of controlled spaces, nostalgic pastiche, public-private partnerships--anything that prevents the public from making choices. Indeed, we are witnessing what Koolhaas called "a very strong drive in the current culture of America toward the bland, away from the new and toward the utterly regurgitated." New Urbanism is not the culprit, then; it is a symptom of a larger move away from risk, away from the urban.

What we need instead is a multivalent space, a neighborhood with a multiplicity of possibilities. Instead of manicured piazzas and obsessive pre-planning, the area needs to be open to an assortment of interests. We need more than just restaurants and bookshops. We need a thousand things: supermarkets, gyms, bars, brothels, galleries. The list goes on, but the point is that we need a space where anything might happen. The space needs possibilities, because without possibilities neighborhoods remain little more than shells waiting to be filled.

If we need a plan--for the city had to present a plan, to win money that John Rowland promised, but never delivered, when he was governor--it should be a plan more sensitive to the kind of city we have: a city of neighborhoods. Neighborhoods work best when the public has something invested in them, when it can imbue spaces with life and stories. If the mayor and his people have their way, this will not happen here. Here we have the best of intentions, but not the best of decisions. There is no vitality in the currently proposed plan--no space for risks, fun, danger, dreams. To put it another way, there is no city.