29 Small City Natural Environment • Feature • YUDW private properties. In the era of Urban Renewal, the solution would have been obvious: the city would seize the properties, evict the owners, and clear the land. In the 21st century, that tool is rightfully toxic. Instead, we proposed a pilot based on geometry and negotiation. The city owned only one parcel in the entire district. Rather than waiting to acquire the rest, the YUDW proposed building an office building, a piece of the new street, and a fragment of a public waterfront on that one city-owned site. Crucially, this building was designed to house the headquarters of Bilco Hatch, retaining a key employer in West Haven while freeing up their former industrial site for the park. This single building was designed to act as the pilot for the entire new street grid. By positioning it according to the future street alignment rather than the existing one, the strategy was to physically demonstrate the new spatial configuration. It was an attempt to prove that the new district could be built incrementally, piece by piece, without the heavy hand of eminent domain, and in this way, was a rejection of the “bulldozer” method. The building was intended to act as a localized surge of investment and an example of a new scale and quality of development viable in this City, setting a new architectural standard for the parcels that would follow. New London and Groton: The “Guerrilla” Heritage Park Forty miles east, the cities of New London and Groton faced a different
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