Yesterday, we covered Trenton's very cool Trenton Ferry development. Today, it's Hartford's Hollander Center, a LEED-EB candidate that recently broke out the first green roof in Connecticut's capital city. Don't worry, this is still gbNYC, not gbTheCapitalCitiesOfOtherAdjacentStates, but when good green news happens in other cities, it's still worthy of mention. Especially when, as in the case of the Hollander Center, the project in question could represent a real step forward in a city that could use a boost. Hartford, like Trenton, is a moderately faded metropolis that already has the jobs, transit options, infrastructure and building stock in place for a green reinvention. So while the Hollander's green roof is lovely, the possibilty this project represents -- a sustainable revival in the heart of Hartford's seen-better-days downtown -- is even more exciting.
The Hollander is the first LEED certified residential building in Connecticut and has the aforementioned lovely green roof (and well-documented here, in Common Ground NYC's Flickr feed), but its status as the first affordable housing development in Hartford's downtown seems as notable as its many green design elements. Hartford already has its share of green buildings -- from ultra-green duplexes in the Swift Village neighborhood to Pelli Clarke Pelli's striking LEED Silver Connecticut Science Center on the waterfront -- but a vibrant city center is one vital sustainable element the city still lacks. The former Capitol Building (not to be confused with Hartford's actual State Capitol) was donated by owners Ruth B. and Milton Hollander to the New York City-based affordable housing developer Common Ground after sitting vacant for years, and seems like a notably praiseworthy step in the direction of making Hartford's downtown viable again. With 13,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space and 70 mixed-income apartments (56 are designated for affordable housing, 14 will rent at market rates), the Hollander should certainly increase what Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez termed "feet on the street" and could provide a landmark of progress downtown.
Oh, and it also has a ton of neat green features. We mentioned the green roof (and we keep mentioning it because we love green roofs), and The Hollander also has high-performance windows, high-efficiency HVAC systems and low-flow fixtures, as well as a host of other sustainable amenities detailed in this post at the invaluable BuildingCTGreen blog. We hope to have more good news to report from Connecticut in the future. We'll need it, if we're ever going to get that gbTheCapitalCitiesOfOtherAdjacentStates site off the ground. Luckily, the domain name is still available.
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Thanks
David,
Thanks for the kind words regarding buildingctgreen.com. The Hollander is one more example of how the greater Hartford area is becoming a rising green rock star in New England rather than a "moderately faded metropolis." Besides the buildings you mention, Aetna's historic corporate offices has one LEED(R) EB space that has already been certified and another space that was recently registered LEED(R). The Phoenix building, one of the first two-sided buildings in the world has several floors registered with the LEED-CI program and the Mark Twain House Museum is also LEED certified. Besides buildings, we are one of only a handful of cities in the country to have a fuel celled power downtown commuter bus and solar powered parking meters. We may not be New York City green but we are pretty proud of our sustainable city.
Thanks again for the props. Say hi to Steve for me.
Adam
Adam Ney
Managing Content Director
buildingctgreen.com/Auggie V's Green Blog
Oh, You're Welcome
Very welcome, Adam -- it's easy praise to give, since you guys really do good work. Obviously, Connecticut is not really an area of great expertise to me, but I'm pleased to hear of all the good green goings-on in Hartford and a little chagrined at having assumed otherwise. By all means keep me/us posted on other leaps forward there, and please keep up the good work. I'll need you to, if I'm ever going to know what I'm talking about when it comes to sustainable stuff in Connecticut.
On a side note, I can't help but think that places like Hartford and Trenton -- where the buildings are old and fairly charming and comparatively cheap -- could emerge as the laboratories of sustainable development in years to come. New York is expensive and obsessed with new construction, but retrofits and Hollander-style overhauls are much more exciting to me, personally, because they preserve architectural and aesthetic character while simultaneously modernizing what needs to be modernized. I'm excited to see where's next. Syracuse? Danbury? I assume Bridgeport and Camden will not be it.
Adam, Syracuse
Hi Adam, good to hear from you- hope we can still organize a time to meet up sometime soon. Thanks for noting what's happening in the CT green building space; we'll continue keeping a close eye on it here at gbNYC.
David, Syracuse has been doing a lot of interesting green stuff for a while now. Take a look back through our archives- from the enormous Destiny project to some very interesting residential concepts out of SU's school of architecture.
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