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July 2, 2019

Reach for the sky: A tale of tall buildings

By Michael C. Bingham

 

New Haven in 1919 (top) and 2019: Over a century, a (sort-of) skyline evolves.

 

Hartford: City of light, even at night.

Can you judge a city by its skyline?

Not in Connecticut. The state’s largest city, Bridgeport, has virtually no skyline — just three structures (Bridgeport Center, Park City Plaza and Embassy Towers) over ten stories — and none among the 25 tallest in the state. (The most prominent profile on the Bridgeport skyline is a smokestack, for heaven’s sake.)

Our capital city, Hartford, has a kind-of skyline that mimics major cities (just more condensed), topped by the 38-story, 535-foot City Place I. (Stamford doesn’t count, because it’s New York.)

In skyline terms, New Haven falls in between Hartford and Bridgeport. Two of the three tallest structures — the 26-story Connecticut Financial Center (383 feet tall — the only Elm City structure among Connecticut’s top-10 tallest) and the 31-story 360 State Street (338 feet) are baby buildings chronologically — completed in 1990 and 2010, respectively. The skyline’s most distinctive silhouette, the 321-foot Knights of Columbus headquarters tower, was completed in 1969.

For much of the 20th century, New Haven’s tallest structure was the 17-story (196 feet in height) Southern New England Telephone building on Church Street. When that structure opened in 1938 it eclipsed (literally and figuratively) its almost-neighbor, the c. 1927 Union Trust building (164 feet) on the northeast corner of Church and Elm.

What superseded the SNET HQ at the top of the heap in 1966 was a building that few today even think of as part of the city skyline — the 250-foot Kline Biology Tower atop Science Hill, still (and likely forever) the tallest structure on the Yale campus.

Two of the tallest Connecticut structures you’d likely never guess — because they’re not even located in cities. Completed in 2002, the 36-story (486 feet) Mohegan Sun Sky Tower is the state’s tallest building outside of Hartford. Its newer (2007) Foxwoods counterpart is larger in volume, but not in height (325 feet, 26 stories).

To try to make sense of Connecticut’s mishmosh of tall buildings and why they sprouted where they did, we asked a certifiable Big Thinker about these things — Madison architect Duo Dickinson, who writes about architecture and urbanism for a host of print and online periodicals.

What strikes Dickinson most about Connecticut’s urban skylines is not just the absence of tall buildings — but the dearth of structures worthy of distinction.

“Bridgeport has but one iconic presence in urban architecture, for good or for ill, the People’s Bank Building by Richard Meier,” Dickinson observes. “The array of completely uncoordinated buildings along I-91 or I-84 in Hartford shows tall buildings in strange comparison. Stamford has an ever-growing [profile] of bland towers and the Elephant Parade of ‘Mod’ buildings hard by I-95.”

Why does New Haven not have a skyline a la Hartford or Stamford? For one thing, Dickinson explains, New Haven’s urban core is dominated, purposely, by open space. It is not being facetious to observe that the city’s “skyline” is actually on the ground — the New Haven Green and the surrounding low-rise Yale campus.

That open space at the Elm City’s core “allows air between the towers of Philip Johnson (Kline Tower), Kevin Roche (Knights of Columbus) and James Gamble Rogers (Harkness Tower),” Dickinson adds.

Moreover, “The common denominator for these small cities (unlike New York City) is that any water view is now forgotten” — unlike a century ago, when any artistic representation would be from the vantage point of Long Island Sound or the Connecticut River. “Now the car, on the elevated highway, is how we see, and thus remember, skylines.

“It is life at 60 mph,” he adds.

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