Buildings and Features
The Long Wharf area contains several notable features and buildings, including the Long Wharf Theatre, Gateway Community College, the Long Wharf Maritime Center, Sargent (a New Haven firm with a history going back to 1810, now a division of Assa Abloy), the headquarters of the New Haven Register, as well as New Haven's Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park which stretches for seventeen acres (69,000 m²) directly along the harborfront. Long Wharf is also the home port of a life-size replica of the historical Amistad slaveship.
The area also includes the remaining portion of Marcel Breuer's landmark Armstrong Rubber/Pirelli Tire Building (1969). The building was truncated in 2003 to accommodate the construction of the new IKEA home products store. IKEA originally proposed to destroy the entire building but compromised after a lengthy public debate. The tower was preserved but the rear portion was razed to make room for the IKEA parking lot. Ironically, IKEA's furniture styling is strongly influenced by the famed Bauhaus school where Breuer taught.
The neighborhood is primarily a mixed-use district, with a combination of commercial, educational, industrial, port, and recreation facilities taking up the majority of the neighborhood's land space. It was once hoped that a large shopping mall, the New Haven Galleria, would be constructed in Long Wharf; instead the IKEA store was built.
Read more about this topic: Long Wharf (New Haven)
Famous quotes containing the words buildings and/or features:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)