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Yale turning downtown New Haven into upscale outdoor shoping mall


beerbeer

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I will say this and I do not wander to anger anyone. Some college towns/cities rely greatly on their colleges and there colleges bring tons of new life to them. In New Haven Yale is a great asset to New Haven along with SCSU, Albertus Magnus, Gateway Community, University New Haven and Quinnipiac. In Burlington, VT there is UVM and Champlain College. In Boston we all know there are tons of colleges inclduding BU, Northeastern, Harvard, MIT and BC.

I have been to Providence and College Hill is beautiful. It reminds me of the Back Bay and Nantucket mixed. But while I walked the streets of Providence I did not see that many college students. Also these students are in college hill which is very close to downtown but still not downtown like in New Haven or Burlington.

NYC has NYU which adds life into that area of Manhattan. Other areas of the city though could live without there colleges because NYC is NYC. Fordham has a Linclon Center Campus that you would never know about where a few thousands kids live in two high rises. Now on the other hand some smaller colleges and universities in NYC help their neighborhoods immensly. For example I am going to Manhattan College in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and this is almost like Trinity in Hartford. Riverdale is a beautiful section of the Bronx like the West End of Hartford but there is also the bad part of the Bronx and schools like Manhattan College, the College of MT ST Vincent (in the Riverdale section of the Bronx) and Fordham Rose Hill in the Bronx draw students to local restaurants and stores and to help in these communities which may not be the best

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Heh, this is similar to Palmer Square at Princeton (probably the most upscale square near an Ivy league institution.) The leasers of Palmer Square have thrown out several retailers it deemed "unfit" for the area, such as throwing out Gap and Burger King which tarnished its reputation. And filling in those vacancies is wheree the university comes in. Each year, Princeton sends out an internet poll to half its student population asking for top 5 stores, top 5 restaurants, etc to bring to the square and nassau street. In 2004, the university pulled in a ralph lauren. 2005 pulled in a kate spade nad 2006 a chipotle is planned. THe university has a huge influence on the small, nearby town.

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I have been to Providence and College Hill is beautiful. It reminds me of the Back Bay and Nantucket mixed. But while I walked the streets of Providence I did not see that many college students. Also these students are in college hill which is very close to downtown but still not downtown like in New Haven or Burlington.

Just for informational purposes. When did you walk the city streets? If it was during the summer than you are correct there aren't many. But the city now has a new RISD dorm in a former 17 story bank building. This has greatly added to college pedestrians. Johnson and Wales also has multiple dorms in the city district, classes for the most part are not down city, which adds a huge population and pedestrian traffic.

There is also much foot traffic to Providence Place from College Hill. Like Yale Brown has its own business type district, but it is on the other side of the hill and is away from down city and is an area unto its own.

Come into Providence on a Friday or Saturday night, sometimes Wednesday also, and you will find 10-15,000 students from around the area being entertained at the mulitple clubs down city.

The point is this, New Haven was built with broad avenues and Yale was melded into the downtown makeup. Providence was built with narrow winding roads and Brown was built away from the down city area.

Mark

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I heard that Trinity college was originally situated on the slope of Asylum Hill, directly west of downtown. I understood that they considered the Washington street area near the Capitol before relocating to the present location further south.

Trinity was located from its 1823 founding until the 1870's on the current site of Connecticut's state capital building (on Trinity Street, coincidently). The college "sold" (essentially due to threat of eminent domain) the site to the state for the new state capital for several hundred thousand dollars. The details of the sale required that the college remain within the city limits so the school relocated to a large tract of land in what was then "the country". The move to the open pastures was dictated by the colleges plans to create a large academic building which was never fully completed. I will post a picture of the model I created of it. Had it been built it probably would have rivaled the US Capital Bldg.

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It's mainly a thick foamcore I had lying around with a facade made out of 1/16" plexiglass. The only thing I was disappointed with was the chapel. Because the only thing I had to work with was a floor plan and the architect's bird's-eye view, I had to extrapolate a lot. Most of the buildings are to scale, but in order to make the Chapel match the original rendering it had to be made larger than scale would allow....according to the model that Chapel would be about as tall as the Gold Building, making it shorter however was not true to the architects renderings, although I doubt he seriously meant to build a 400 foot chapel in the 1880's.

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