By Mary E. O’Leary, Register Topics Editor

NEW HAVEN — The groundbreaking for Yale-New Haven Hospital’s clinical laboratory Tuesday will be followed by a garage/housing project next month, kicking off construction of all the components needed to support the Smilow Cancer Hospital.

City and state officials also confirmed Tuesday resolution of other conflicts that will allow projects they expect to further promote development in the area.

The $92.8 million glass laboratory building planned at 60 Park St., to be built by the Fusco Corp., will fill dead space at the end of the Air Rights Garage and was pitched as one element of long-term plans to knit the city back together where it is severed by Route 34.

Route 34 splits the Hill neighborhood and the medical corridor shared by Yale-New Haven Hospital and the Yale Medical School from the Dwight neighborhood and downtown.

The glass-covered, nine-story lab and hospital pharmacy building, to be located between North Frontage and South Frontage roads, will be connected to Smilow with a bridge at the fourth level and a tunnel underneath for deliveries, and loading docks that will keep trucks off local streets. The first floor will have retail space.

“It will glow at night. It will really be a beacon in the evening,” said architect Barry Svigals of reflecting and translucent panels that will cover the facade. The building was designed by Svigals and Partners in conjunction with Behnisch and Partners.

A parking solution also has been found for 300 workers at the Connecticut Mental Health Center at Park Street, who will be displaced at the end of the month when developer Intercontinental of Boston takes over property for a new hospital garage.

Robert Cole, chief operating officer at the mental health center, said for the next few years, state workers will park farther down the Route 34 corridor in New Haven Parking Authority lots, and then will switch permanently to space at the Air Rights Garage.

State Sen. Toni Harp, D-New Haven, Tuesday said she hopes the state legislature, at its special session June 11, will consider transferring a right of way on Route 34, leading into the garage, to the city, which would allow a future extension of 300 George St. over the site by developer Carter Winstanley.

Mayor John DeStefano Jr. also took the occasion of the groundbreaking to emphasize the need to reconstruct the street grid in the Hill around the hospital and fill it with a dense development of retail and housing, in an upgraded version of the former Legion Avenue neighborhood decimated by redevelopment in the 1960s.

AdvertisementThe key is some $30 million needed to roll the Route 34 connector back to the Interstate 91 and Interstate 95 interchange, and to replace it with a boulevard, an economic development project DeStefano said he would push with the state in the next legislative session.

“Our aspiration should be so much more than the sum of these pieces (hospital projects) one at a time,” DeStefano said. “This dreadful highway needs to be removed going east from this building,” he said, back to the railroad tracks near the former Veterans Memorial Coliseum site.

Marna Borgstrom, chief executive officer and president of Yale-New Haven Hospital, said the Smilow Cancer Hospital, the laboratory building and the garage will have an economic impact of $1 billion on the local economy, in addition to creating 600 permanent jobs, as well as construction work.

Both the Park Street building and the garage will be taxable properties, with Y-NH occupying them as tenants.

The $467 million Smilow Cancer Hospital plans a topping-off ceremony June 21, when the steel will be in place for all 14 floors. The first several floors are expected to be open in fall 2009, with the rest in spring 2010.

Intercontinental’s plans for an 845-space garage for medical personnel, office space and 24 units of housing for hospital visitors and patients’ families, will begin June 24.

Borgstrom said of the 50 people in Connecticut who are daily diagnosed with cancer, 12 of them in Greater New Haven, the new facilities “will offer new hope. ... This is a really positive milestone for everyone.”

The city and Y-NH were at odds for years over a unionizing effort at the hospital, then on details of the housing component at the garage site on the block bound by Howe and Dwight streets, Legion Avenue and North Frontage Road.

That appears to have been reconciled, given DeStefano’s remarks Tuesday.

“Marna has worked so hard to strengthen this relationship in the last year,” DeStefano said.