Our design attempts to restore meaningful aspects from the past to bring back the Broadway District's sense of place, yet equip its infrastructure for the future. When the replanted American elms mature, Broadway will become a truly great place.

Broadway was a flourishing retail precinct during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the area's pedestrian vitality was eroded by parking lots and traffic problems. The City of New Haven and Yale University jointly developed a project to revive the district, asking us to do the design.

The parking island is now sequestered within a ring of American elm trees, the wonder of Broadway in the nineteenth century, and enclosed in new cast iron fencing, a replica of the fencing that encircles the New Haven Green. We redesigned the roads to improve traffic flow, provided a number of safe pedestrian crossings,more clearly defined the sidewalks and increased curbside parking spaces adjacent to the stores.

To give the streetscape pedestrian scale, we buried the utility lines, widened and paved the sidewalks, narrowed the road pavement, installed new kiosks, bus shelters, street furniture and lighting, and planted elm trees. We enlarged the existing Soldier's Monument Park and created a new "market island" to encourage street market activity. We hope a new shed, which we also designed, will one day be built here.

Re-established as a significant place within the fabric of New Haven, the Broadway District thrives at the confluence of urban and campus life.