Hartford on the horizon: What’s next, what’s needed

Downtown Hartford is a far different place than it was a decade ago, or even five years ago.

More than a thousand new apartments occupy formerly vacant office buildings, with more on the way. A minor league ballpark can hardly be called new anymore, finishing up its third season with the Yard Goats. And UConn’s regional campus at Front Street is embarking on another fall semester, its third welcoming students to the city.

“Whether it’s higher education, whether it’s the sports venues, whether it’s the housing, all that has created a downtown energy that hasn’t existed since the 1980s,” said James Carter, board chairman of the iQuilt Partnership, which promotes making downtown more walkable and linking together its cultural assets.

An upswing in downtown residents, particularly younger people, is encouraging. The Yard Goats and, now, the Hartford Athletic are bringing a broader cross-section of sports fans to the city. There are more events downtown, such as the Pratt Street Salsa Socials and the Friday beer garden at Bushnell Park.

“The soccer team had a kind of a block party with Hooker Brewery,” said Carter, managing partner at Carter Realty. “It’s that kind of energy and vibe that you want to create to attract people to the city. We need to keep it going, quite frankly.”

That vibrant weekend and evening activity and energy is just one of the elements that will be crucial if the robust city of the future that many envision will actually take shape. Also key are walkability, more informal gathering venues, more shopping and restaurants, a stronger connection to the city’s neighborhoods and a healthy job market.

Cycles on the cusp of revival

The optimism surrounding Hartford is an old story in the city, which was once an economic and manufacturing powerhouse.

No matter what decade in the past 60 years you pick, the Capital City seemed always on the verge of revival. In the 1960s, it was Constitution Plaza. In the 1970s, it was the Civic Center arena. In the 1980s and 1990s, office construction. And in the 2000s, the first wave of apartments and the convention center.

“There’s always this feeling of being on the cusp of something but never quite getting there,” said Donald Poland, an urban planner who has studied Hartford redevelopment for decades.

As a small city sandwiched between metropolitan giants New York and Boston, Hartford certainly feels setback shocks more acutely than other, larger cities. The construction of I-84 sliced the city in half and ripped apart neighborhoods. The mainstay insurance industry contracted. Corporate headquarters dwindled. Devastating recessions took their toll, turning off the financing spigot. Property taxes soared on commercial properties.

The city’s pride took it on the chin with the loss of the NHL Hartford Whalers in 1997.

“I still remember Brendan Shanahan of the Whalers making the comment that the sidewalks roll up at 9 o’clock,” Poland said.

To some extent, measuring the success of redevelopment is difficult because the city has been in a state of redevelopment since the 1950s.

“So the idea of constantly remaking makes it hard to define what success is, or what is the redeveloped city,” said Poland, the urban planner. “It’s kind of become the norm. Have we really improved? Or maybe this is just what we do.”

A different path: Smaller projects

To be sure, revitalization is taking a different path this time around. It is not relying on massive projects like the construction of the Hartford 21 tower or a mammoth convention center by the Connecticut River in the early 2000s, the last period of revival.

Instead, smaller projects are aimed at repairing the torn fabric of the city in a less dramatic — but no less potent — way.

Together, they are seen as having the power to reshape Hartford in a way that promises to position it for growth in an era when cities nationwide are flourishing.

Bolstered by hefty public subsidies, the spate of current development is capitalizing on a movement fueled by millennials and retiring Baby Boomers who don’t want to devote the time and money to maintaining a home in the suburbs.

Plans in the pipeline are becoming bolder: a housing and entertainment center on a transformed Pratt Street and whole new, mixed-use neighborhoods around Dunkin’ Donuts Park and The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, as well as along the Allyn Street corridor between the XL Center and Union Station.

The projects also are starting to move out from the central business district to the neighborhoods They now include the renovation of the historic M. Swift & Sons gold leafing factory north of downtown for a new generation of businesses, and a new apartment complex at the corner of Park and Main streets on two vacant lots that have been eyesores for years.

While the movement forward is reason to be optimistic, progress is still in the nascent stage and much more still needs to happen. Apartment developers continue to invest heavily, confident of demand — pointing to high occupancy rates in the new buildings.

Jason Styra, an account manager at an IT consulting and placement firm, lived in the city’s West End for nearly a decade before moving downtown last year to an apartment in Union Place. He likes being able to walk everywhere, with five restaurants within a short distance.

Sure, Styra, 31, would like to see more to do on weekends, but he said it is a mistake to assume that a dearth of foot traffic, especially weeknights, is a sign the city lacks life.

“I think Hartford still, as a whole, has a lot of that ‘come home, stay home,’ even downtown,” Styra said. “That said, it’s slowly changing and becoming more of ‘this going on after work’ and ‘that going on after work,’ and more people are coming home at 9, which is good.”

Styra, active in Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs of Hartford, or HYPE, said downtown could use more shops — certainly a full-service grocery store — and restaurants. There need to be more restaurants that invite lingering and conversation as opposed to sitting down, ordering, eating and leaving, a bit more like The Half Door in the West End, he said.

The smaller nature of downtown Hartford is attractive to Ethan Newton, who had not lived in an urban environment before, spending most of his life in less populated parts of Virginia and Maryland. This summer, Newton, 29, moved to the Spectra Plaza apartments with his girlfriend.

“You don’t feel like if you walk out your door, you’re going to be trampled by a hundred people,” said Newton, an assistant baseball coach at the University of Hartford. “It’s not a situation where you’re going to feel overwhelmed or you’re going to feel claustrophobic with people. There are things going on, there are people hanging out, there are places to spend time.”

Carter, at the iQuilt Partnership, says there is still one key ingredient missing from the revitalization — and it’s a big one: jobs.

“The thing that is holding us back is employment growth, because if we had employment growth, we would take off,” Carter said. “Without employment growth, the energy is only going to go so far.”

Housing, Carter said, in itself won’t lift the city’s economy and attractiveness. What it does show, he says, to current and future employers is that “this is a viable downtown, because that’s how they attract young people to move to Hartford.”

Certainly, momentum is gathering behind initiatives such as makerspaces and Upward Hartford that seek to recast the image of Hartford from staid center of financial services to a more exciting hub of innovation and entrepreneurship. That spirit of nimble creativity and resourcefulness has become crucial to businesses large and small, with the keys to success changing quickly in a digital world.

What Carter would like to see is a development in downtown on the magnitude of Ideanomics’ plans for “Fintech Village” in West Hartford.

“It could be as small as one company, but if a substantive company said they were moving 500 jobs to Hartford from, say, Maryland or some place like that, it could turn the tide on this,” he said. “To me, I see more of the same in five years, if we don’t attract more employment growth.”

The addition of Infosys, the giant India-based company that’s building its innovation hub for insurance, health care and manufacturing technology in downtown’s Goodwin Square office tower, is expected to bring a total of 1,000 jobs by 2023. But now, there also are worries about how United Bank’s headquarters in the same office building — and 200 jobs — will be affected by the recently-announced acquisition by People’s United Bank.

Despite the challenges of employment, the foundation of a sustainable revitalization appears to be falling into place downtown. In five years, it is possible street life will attain the long-sought vibrancy as more “visual gaps” — empty, vacant spaces — are filled in, giving pedestrians more interesting things to see and do as they stroll along city streets.

Questions about the future XL Center arena, at the heart of the downtown, will likely be solved, and that’s considered a linchpin of the city’s future success. A renovated venue could take on a more day-to-day role, with new stores, restaurants, gathering places and smaller-scale entertainment.

Hartford Democrat Matt Ritter, the legislature’s majority leader, said earlier this summer that the ultimate goal is to make the XL Center a place that is used more than just when there is a game, concert or other big event.

“You have to think about the things you can add to the XL Center, “Ritter said, “that people might say, “Yeah, I’m willing to go there to watch sports on TV or other activities there.”