Officials hope a train station will make property within walking distance more viable for private redevelopment.
When Metro-North trains run through the East Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, passengers don’t see much beyond a jungle of abandoned factories.
But on the site of an old ammunition factory, the state plans to build a second rail station for the city. It’s a part of Bridgeport that needs development the most, some say.
“Because right now, you’ve got mostly ghetto. This is ghetto,” said Ricardo Perez, who lives around the corner, as he walked his dog around the neighborhood block.
Perez said that an upswing in this neighborhood hinges on building the right kind of housing. He gestured to an abandoned house.
“Houses like that -- have them fixed. During the night, the guys that pick up cans, they go into this house during the night to sleep,” Perez said.
This part of town was once developed as an industrial hub in the 19th century under the watch of the famous circusman and former Bridgeport mayor P.T. Barnum. But now, it’s impoverished, and crumbling.
“So if you turn that around, more people with money will be interested in this because it will be easier for people to transport themselves,” Perez said.
The Connecticut Department of Transportation has similar hopes for the site around the proposed station on 889 Barnum Ave.
“The entire project is designed to foster that type of [transit-oriented] development,” said DOT Assistant Rail Administrator John Bernick.
But not everyone thinks a train station should be the main catalyst for development in the East Side of Bridgeport. Jim Cameron of the Commuter Action Group said he’s skeptical that this is a good investment for the state, wary of slow commercial development around a new train station in the neighboring town of Fairfield.
Not everyone thinks a train station should be the main catalyst for development in the East Side of Bridgeport.
“We do need more service, more stations, certainly more parking to get people on to the trains. And maybe the Barnum location is a good one, but I don’t think we can automatically assume that if we build a station, suddenly there will be an influx of developers with offices, and apartments, and mixed-use buildings that will follow,” Cameron said.
The new station, named for P.T. Barnum, would provide Amtrak and Metro-North express service.
In the neighborhood itself, it’s not the potential commuting connection that stirs the most excitement -- it’s the businesses that could sprout up around the station.
The transportation network is good enough, said Winsome Griffiths, who’s lived in the neighborhood for ten years. It’s the jobs they need, she said.
“It’s a form of development for the area,” said Griffiths as she waited at a bus stop next to the future Barnum station site. “Somebody can be employed here.”
The average income of East Bridgeport is $10,000 less than the city as a whole, and 33 percent of the people who live in the neighborhood don’t have a car -- statistics U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy cited earlier this year when voicing support for the project.
“The opportunity is the highest for development here, but the need is also the highest,” Murphy said.
So why should the East Side's economic revitalization center around a train station? Bernick said it’s part of a development trend in the northeast.
“TOD is a bit of a new thing for us. It’s not a new thing for the rest of the country. New Jersey has tremendous success with these types of developments,” Bernick said. “In fact, it’s a very competitive market for transit-oriented development in New Jersey.”
And Bernick said the city’s plan to build a second station keyed in nicely with Gov. Dannel Malloy’s initiative to have more frequent express and local service on the Metro-North line.
David Kooris, director of Bridgeport's office of planning and economic development, said that the train station will make property within walking distance or a transit connection more viable for private redevelopment.
"We have about 850 acres of developable, former industrial, and oftentimes contaminated land in this portion of the city. Much more effective than subsidizing any one development, would be making investments in infrastructure that add value to those properties, to make their private redevelopment more feasible," Kooris said.
The state received a $10 million federal grant earlier this year to go toward the station’s design and construction, but it won’t cover the entire cost of the nearly $150 million project. The rest of the funds, mostly coming from the state, will kick in with the ramp-up of Malloy’s $100 billion transportation overhaul around 2018, Bernick said.
The complication is that there’s no clear way to fund Malloy’s ambitious state-wide plan, Cameron said. He said the Barnum station will only be a pipe dream if it doesn’t get the funding.
“Whether it’s tolls, or taxes, or fare increases, there is no painless way to come up with the money to pay for the Barnum Station or any of the other projects that the governor proposes,” Cameron said. “But we can’t have the transportation systems that we need and we deserve, and we probably want, if weren’t not willing to pay for them.”
Walking by the future site of the Barnum Station, East Bridgeport resident Julius McCord said that he usually gets around Bridgeport on foot. When it comes to traveling outside of Bridgeport, McCord walks to the station downtown.
“It’s kind of a long walk for me to go downtown. If they have something right here, that would be really convenient. I won’t have to walk as far, or take the bus at all.”
McCord said building another station for the city would be a matter of convenience, not necessity.
“But Bridgeport is pretty big, so I mean I feel like they should at least have train stations on opposite sides of town,” McCord said. “But I’m all for it. As long as we keep building Bridgeport.”
