Vernon Street to become Trinity's "Main Street," following a major facelift
 

Major reconstruction of Vernon Street began in July, continuing the ongoing momentum of the College’s campus master plan and marking the first renovation of the street in 40 years. The project will include a range of improvements designed to integrate the increasingly vital street with the look and feel of the rest of the campus, from the relocation of all utilities underground, to the planting of more than 100 trees along both sides of the street.

            Ron Thomas, acting president and chair of the design review committee, comments that the project continues one of campus master plan’s key initiatives, which is “to bring consistency and high standards to campus design and construction and to preserve the sense of Trinity as a beautiful urban park.”

            In an effort to increase pedestrian safety on the street, sidewalks will be widened, traffic-calming devices will be added, new lights will be installed along the street, and new crosswalks, raised to the height of the sidewalk, will divide the street into five distinct sections. A low brownstone retaining wall will run adjacent to the sidewalk, which, from Summit Street to Broad Street, spans the length of approximately three city blocks. Special attention will be given to establishing the section between the Koeppel Bistro and Vernon Center as an attractive pedestrian area, and drop-off areas have been incorporated into the design to further this effort.

            In a recent Tripod article, Mike West, senior vice president of finance, said the project will be “a complete reconstruction of the street. It will integrate North Campus with the rest of Trinity, as well as make Vernon Street a safer place. It’s going to be terrific when it’s completed,” said West.

            Another major component of the reconstruction, the relocation of utilities underground, will provide a timely upgrade to those facilities, some of which are more than 125 years old. Most of this underground work will be completed by the time students arrive on campus in the fall.

            John Woolley, director of facilities management, stresses that significant steps have been taken to ensure that this major reconstruction project does not disrupt campus life in the fall.

            “It’s going to be our endeavor to keep access to parking areas passable,” Woolley says. A winter road surface should be in place by Thanksgiving, Woolley adds, noting that work will then resume in spring ‘02 and conclude sometime next summer. “It’s going to be a beautiful street-scape when it’s completed.”

            An important feature of the construction is a new pedestrian gateway at the east end of the street that will provide passage to and from the Learning Corridor. The gate will create an important link between the College, the Learning Corridor, TrInfo.Cafe and the surrounding community.

            “It will both literally and--even more importantly--symbolically open the gates, while it maintains control of Vernon Street traffic so as not to endanger the tremendous pedestrian traffic we have there. It will also manage to make even more attractive and significant the placement of our cultural house complex,” Thomas says. “The cultural houses are nicely placed as a kind of announcement about the values that Trinity promotes.”

            Thomas says the new pedestrian gate will be designed in such way that if appropriate--based on what is observed from Learning Corridor traffic--it could be retrofitted to also admit automobiles sometime in the future. A generous turnaround will be added to Vernon Street near the gate so that automobiles may turn around easily without entering the parking lots.

            “A key intention of the master plan was to provide a more welcoming relationship between the campus and the community and this is a very important part of that effort,” Thomas says.

            Quenell, Rothschild & Partners LLP of New York designed the seven million dollar reconstruction project, in cooperation with Cooper, Robertson & Partners, also of New York.

            Vernon Street is one of many major construction and renovation projects currently being completed on campus, during a period of ambitious growth and development. “When you stop and think about what we’ve done and the amount of time we’ve done it in, it’s impressive,” Thomas says.