En Route:
A Public Space Study of Federal Plaza

Conceived of as a conduit to connect government buildings in downtown New Haven, the Federal Plaza continues to scaffold human movement between Orange Street, the bustling edge of the New Haven Green at Church Street, and the five civic destinations abutting it. At the heart of the city’s Government Center, the plaza links five service buildings—City Hall, the Richard C. Lee Courthouse, the Robert N. Giaimo Federal Building, the Hall of Records, and the Connecticut Financial Center—and the history of these buildings and the plaza itself represent a microcosm of the story of large-scale urban renewal that saturated the mid-20th century American sociocultural milieu (Figure 1). The plaza has been the protagonist in debates over rights to space, from the battle between Connecticut’s federal judges and the U.S. General Services Administration over architect I.M. Pei’s 1965 Government Center Plan to recent efforts to remove private parking in the plaza and introduce amenities for public use [1]. Since Pei’s demolitionist 1965 Plan (Figure 2) was thwarted, James Gamble Rogers’s 1913 federal courthouse building has been renovated [2]. Concurrently, new construction—the Federal Building (1978), Alexander Liberman’s cherry-red steel 44-foot sculpture “On High” (1979) (Figure 5), and the 28-story Connecticut Financial Center (1987) (Figure 4)—have nucleated at the site, framing the present-day plaza.

A series of studies of the social-spatial elements of the plaza in the morning, afternoon, and evening at the beginning and end of March reveal three strains of tension relevant to the plaza and its environment: (a) movement versus stasis, (b) contact versus isolation, and (c) familiarity versus discovery. By investigating these dichotomies in the context of Federal Plaza, I seek to shed light on the defining character of the space. To use a domestic analog as Jan Gehl did in Life Between Buildings when he dubbed the Piazza del Campo in Siena a “public living room,” the function of Federal Plaza, a stage for walking, can be distilled into one term: a public hallway [3].

MOVEMENT / STASIS

In surveys of the site on several typical weekdays and Saturdays, I observed that human flows dominated Federal Plaza. These flows differed by pace, intent, and termini, combining together to form a net transfer of people between Orange and Church Streets (Figure 3). On weekdays, the plaza as hallway ferried people, the majority of whom walked alone, to-and-from work and to-and-from errands, with a wide range of walking paces. I watched as a mid-30s man with coat half- zipped sprinted across the plaza, his dry-cleaning billowing like the plastic bag in American Beauty. A few minutes later, a young woman leisurely crossed into the plaza from Church Street, her own starched work clothes in tow. Pedestrians traversed the plaza with coffee and groceries, briefcases, and their dogs, individually listening to music or chatting with another co-worker (but never in large groups) (Figure 7). A steady rhythm of people not only crossed the plaza from Orange to Church Street but also entered and exited the plaza from destinations that flanked it (City Hall, federal courthouse, Federal Building, Hall of Records, and the Connecticut Financial Center). Evidence that the plaza is thought of, in the commuter psyche, as a hallway for through- traffic was manifest in the number of bikers in the space. Both on weekdays and weekends, several people biked through the plaza, using the ramp adjacent to the courthouse that leads to Vision Trail. Flows on weekdays and weekends differed markedly in their volume, and flows at night were significantly lower than during the day (Figure 6). During the 5pm end-of-day rush, I saw how employees, emptying from civic buildings, inundated the space. As people exited from City Hall or the Hall of Records, the entrances to which are not clearly in view within the plaza, the sensation that people just materialized within the plaza was palpable. The high-intensity use of the plaza during the weekday daylight hours—and the fact that this use continued during weekends (although, by comparison, weekend use of the plaza occurred much less frequently)—suggests the plaza’s ability, as a well- functioning movement system, to accommodate the “box of speeds” that course through New Haven [4].

By contrast, few people lingered in the plaza itself, except on anomalous occasions: one man stopped to pet an acquaintance’s golden retriever; two elementary-aged kids turned Liberman’s loud lipstick-like sculpture into a jungle-gym while their parents tried to rein them in for a photo. Observing the plaza, I felt the foreignness of the act of standing, fielding confused or even skeptical looks. On two separate occasions, security officers policing the Federal Building entrance walked outside to talk with me. Using Jan Gehl’s criteria outlined in Life Between Buildings, the absence of “staying” in the plaza itself can be attributed to the deficit of “zones for staying.”[5] Liberman’s behemoth “On High” creates a visual barrier that siphons off the large foyer—the large plaza area between the Federal Building and courthouse—from the Orange-Church Street axis that runs through the plaza. Its raw height and abstract tubular form has the effect of elongating the artwork vertically, walling off the underused area of the plaza from pedestrians not destined for the courthouse or Federal Building. The presence of cars parked in the rear of the courthouse and deficit of attractive seating compound this underuse. The only place where the “edge effect” and a clear pattern of “staying” were visible was the covered entrance to the Federal Building, a “transitional zone” which links the plaza to Orange Street [5]. Pedestrians paused to take phone calls or momentarily rest, avoiding the unfavorable wind in the open plaza by clustering near supports (the bollards at Orange Street, the railing adjacent to the northern half of the Federal Building, the mail and UPS boxes outside of the Federal Building) (Figure 8). The linear benches in the middle of the plaza, centrally location far from the edge of the space and exposed to climate, were only once used for sitting: a middle-aged man perched in a patch of sun to text during a break in foot traffic on a Monday afternoon, barely glancing up from his phone. More commonly, these benches were ignored or reinvented: two girls playfully used them as a balancing beam (Figure 9). The design of the plaza fails to invite staying and sitting, yet the plaza demonstrates an ability to meet the demands of foot traffic.

According to Zucker’s typology, Federal Plaza can be regarded as a dominated square, magnetically pulling people towards the Green and, specifically, the landmark of the World War Memorial Flagpole [6]. On entering the plaza from Church Street, the Memorial Flagpole stretches vertically towards the sky, firmly in view, while the flagpole in the plaza is hidden. The plaza has a distinct spatial sequence that, comprised of a set of “recession plane[s]”, clarifies the significance of the Memorial Flagpole within the plaza and strengthens the dominance of the Orange-Church Street axis (Figure 10) [7][8]. This sequence progresses from the one-story Federal Building vestibule to the open plaza, with its spaciousness produced by the large foyer area between the courthouse and the Federal Building and commanded by the “On High” sculpture, plaza flagpole, and towering Connecticut Financial Center. The open plaza leads to regularly spaced lampposts along Vision Trail, in their own right establishing a procession towards the Green and the visible Memorial Flagpole. This axis dictates the major route through the plaza, which, on weekends when destinations in the plaza were closed, constituted the primary route through the space. The space is organized to ensure this direct travel route remains unobstructed and prominent. The plaza flagpole and the large foyer behind the Liberman sculpture are subordinated to the terminating vista of the Memorial Flagpole. In turn, those crossing through the plaza overwhelmingly adhered to the most direct route, rearticulated by the plaza design itself, by cutting straight through the plaza on the linear axis between the Federal Building vestibule and the Vision Trail (Figure 3a) or, if walking to/from City Hall or the Hall of Records and Orange Street, diagonally between the four concrete planters (Figure 3b).

CONTACT / ISOLATION

Possibilities for seeing and hearing others in the plaza are largely limited by the design and function of the space itself [9]. Over a 30-minute timespan on a Monday morning in late March, I surveyed only 11 groups of two and 1 group of three people passing through the plaza, compared with 112 individuals walking alone, and the majority of these groups consisted of people talking casually and sporadically (Figure 6). The direction of these pedestrians’ gazes informed—and reinforced—my spatial analysis. The majority of passersby appeared to stare at nothing: to look ahead or downwards absently in their journey across the plaza or else to look up at the walls to ascertain the architectural frame of the plaza itself. If pedestrians chose to look around, their ‘seeing’ did not center on other users but rather on the sky or the façade of the Federal Building, distracted by the increase in scale within the plaza. I saw two twenty-something girls shouting (“Hello!”) along Vision Trail to hear their voices echo, blanketing themselves in the reverberations that ping-ponged between the Connecticut Financial Center and the courthouse. Two men clad in gear—camera case, lenses— staged photos of the plaza, snapping views of it reflected in the new curtainwall exterior of the Federal Building. We exchanged a glance, the only spectators closely studying the space. Indeed, on a less busy Saturday morning and afternoon, the sounds of the inanimate space largely overshadowed its human dimension. An actor in its own right on the plaza stage, the strong wind cascading down the Connecticut Financial Center commanded the soundscape, causing the metal flagpole to bang recurrently.

Low-intensity contacts in the plaza were confined mainly to the vestibule of the Federal Building. The Federal Building vestibule offered shelter from the winds that whipped through the plaza. Multiple people took phone calls within the vestibule, facing the glass wall of the Federal Building lobby rather than the plaza. Many people passing under the Federal Building overhang glanced into the all-glass lobby of the building, both when it was bustling with weekday activity or empty, suggesting that passersby maintained an interest in watching other people or, very likely, themselves (Figure 11). A few people stopped to drop off mail, or paused to rest on the railings adjacent to the north side of the building. Compared to other design elements in the plaza, the vestibule of the Federal Building most closely approached a “soft edge.” [10] The glass wall of the lobby connected indoor to outdoor, establishing a fluidity and clear line of sight. The irony here is that the Federal Building is closely surveilled, discouraging loitering in this zone. On both a Friday afternoon and Monday morning, I observed a guard on his daily round of surveying the plaza, taking a lap around the plaza, inspecting each planter, and scrutinizing the scene. On one occasion, a guard berated a man who had parked his moped at the bicycle rack (contradictorily, cars were parked outside the courthouse across the plaza). The vestibule itself, constituting the entrance to the plaza from Orange Street, was, in many ways, a more active space for human contact on business days than the plaza on the whole. Dozens of people entered and exited the Federal Building, the main destination on the plaza, home to the IRS and other federal offices.

The plaza, unlike the lobby of the Federal Building, failed to give people a fixed scene of users to observe. The benches attached to each concrete planter in the north of the plaza were barren during the day and night. Their arrangement, facing each other rather than the major Orange-Church Street axis, was conducive only to surveying other people sitting. In all of my surveys, I only once observed people using these benches. Two young men took photos of each other simultaneously, posing near the sterile, boulder-like planters (Figure 12). Their photoshoot, as spectacle, was performative, but I did not feel like I was their audience (and no other people in the plaza seemed to notice). Rather, I sensed that, for these men, the photos mattered more than the live act. Seeing was removed from the physical space of the plaza, and the audience was digital. A similar pattern was visible when other people lingered in the plaza to take photos. A family congregated around the Liberman’s “On High” during the mid-day lunch rush, largely unobserved by passersby in real-time (their ‘being seen’ contingent on the photo ‘being seen’). Federal Plaza thus operated as a space generally agnostic to human contact.

FAMILIARITY / DISCOVERY

In examining Federal Plaza within the context of the extremes of known versus unknown, I determined that people habitually use the plaza as a hallway. As a familiar place, it is embedded in people’s daily travel routines. The large number of passersby who crossed the plaza with head down or forward, not pausing to look around at other users, might indicate the routineness of the walk through the plaza. During the weekdays, in daytime, a large number of people entered and exited the buildings on the plaza on temporary sojourns out of their cubicle-d offices, leaving with a folder and returning with coffee or bags of food (Figure 7). Some people did not even bother to bundle up against the cold—the trek across the plaza to buy lunch or run a midday errand was inherently fast-paced and transient. At the late-afternoon mail collection time, a young woman flirted with the mailman, and the two spoke with a degree of familiarity as if they rehearsed their flirtation and performed it often. Multiple people walked their dogs without leashes (and even their dogs followed the Orange-Church Street axis). At dusk on a Friday afternoon, when the plaza was sparsely populated, I observed one man pausing to take a phone call in the middle of the space. He talked loudly, like he was alone, the scale of the plaza, its large extent, and its relative emptiness creating the illusion of privacy. He paced back and forth like a person might in the hallway of his house. The plaza again functioned as a hallway where a user was absorbed in his own world, not engaging socially with other users in the space but only with the caller on the line. The plaza did not appear as a place that people entered wide-eyed, unfamiliar and keen on uncovering a new space within the city fabric.

CONCLUSION

Enter New Haven’s Federal Plaza at noon any day of the week and bear witness to people en route: an employee rushing to buy lunch at G Café Bakery; a woman with paperwork bounding towards the Federal Building. From studies of the life of the plaza over the course of several days, I came to understand it as a space habitually used for movement rather than an incubator for new human contacts. Weathered by heavy pedestrian transit, Federal Plaza, supported by its distinct spatial configuration, functions as a space that leads to other destinations rather than a destination in-and-of-itself.

ENDNOTES

1. Rachel Chinapen, “New Haven’s Federal Plaza to Get a Facelift,” New Haven Register, last modified July 29, 2013, accessed March 30, 2018.

2. Charles C. Goetsch, “A Short History of the New Haven Federal Courthouse,” Ceremony of Rededication United States District Courthouse New Haven, Connecticut September 27, 1985, 4. Robert N. Giaimo Federal Building: Art in Architecture (General Services Administration, 2018).

3. Jan Gehl, Life between Buildings: Using Public Space (Washington: Island Press, 2011), 41.

4. Rem Koolhaas et al., “How to Build a City: Roman Operating System,” in Mutations: Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Multiplicity, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000), 12.

5. Gehl, Life between, 149.

6. Paul Zucker, “The Square in Space and Time,” in Town and Square: From the Agora to the Village Green (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 8-12.

7. Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 98.

8. Gehl, Life between, 141.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid, 197.