Observations on the End of an EraAuthor(s): Cynthia DavidsonSource: Log, No. 9 (Winter/Spring 2007), p. 86Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765137 .

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Observations on the End of an Era

Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, New Haven Veterans Memorial Stadium, seen from THE HIGHWAY SIDE SHORTLY AFTER ITS COMPLETION IN 1972. AT LEFT, ONE CORNER OF THE LANDMARK Knights of Columbus Head- quarters TOWER, ALSO BY ROCHE Dinkeloo. Photo courtesy the ARCHITECTS*

It was designed in the late 1960s by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates ; construction began in 1968 and was completed in 1972, attracting conventions, concerts, and sporting events to this Connecticut harbor city. But on January 20, 2007, more than four years after New Haven Major John DeStefano had closed it, the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum was laid to rest when, in an early morning implosion triggered by 2,220 pounds of explo- sives, its rooftop parking deck was dramatically dropped to the

ground in a cloud of dust. Located just west of the spaghetti merge of Interstate High-

ways 91 and 95 and State Route $4, the coliseum and adjacent Knights of Columbus Headquarters tower, also designed by Roche (himself a Pritzker winner), were significant landmarks in the city that is also home to Yale University . But where Yale just reopened Louis Kahn' s refurbished Yale Art Gallery Ç and is about to restore Paul Rudolph 's brutalist concrete Art & Architecture

Building), the City of New Haven saw no future for its coliseum, given the rehabilitation and construction of other entertainment venues around the small state, each only a few highway exits away. "It is time to let an old friend go Mayor DeStefano told the New Haven Register. So the dark-glass high rise with brick silos at each corner now stands alone, overseeing the removal of the twist- ed steel and chunks of concrete that constituted the emblematic urban toughness of the coliseum 's design .

Coliseum visitors may have complained about the corkscrew

ramps up to the parking deck, but in a city where the car is king, a rooftop parking lot seemed like genius, freeing the street level for restaurant and retail development But that never transpired. To- day's plan for the site: a surface lot to meet the parking demand at the nearby New Haven Railroad Station, then, eventually, among other things, a theater. Plus ça change. - Cynthia Davidson

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