Talk:Hillhouse Avenue

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relationships of street, HD ,and neighborhoods

I was going to add a reference to the NRHP application of the Hillhouse Avenue Historic District and develop some, but the National Register's web search tool is down right now. The reference will be something like this draft:

^[1]

The historic district, when declared in 1985, included 22 contributing buildings over a18-acre (7.3 ha) area. The district, by the way, was defined to be an area "Bounded by Sachem, Temple, Trumbull, and Prospect Sts., Whitney and Hillhouse Aves. & RR tracks".^[2]

Note that the "quick trace" version of new Haven Neighborhoods outlines, as defined by the City of New Haven, shows that Hillhouse Avenue is included in two neighborhoods (Prospect Hill (neighborhood) and Downtown New Haven). Without consulting the NRHP nom document, it's not clear if the HD is all in Prospect Hill or if it spans neighborhood lines too.^[3]

References

^ Mary McCahon, J. Paul Loether, and John Herzan (December 17, 1984). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Hillhouse Avenue Historic District" (PDF). National Park Service.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) and Accompanying 22 photos, from 1979 and 1985
^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2009-03-13.
^ Maps of the New Haven Neighborhoods (PDF) are available from the City of New Haven's City Plan Department. There are also quick traces from the above PDFs in [http://maps.google.com/?q=http://www.southernct.edu/departments/usc/offcampushousing/New_Haven_Neighborhoods.kml Google Earth/Map Shapes of the New Haven Neighborhoods] (KML).

--doncram (talk) 13:53, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Actually the NRHP document is available now, despite the NPS's main search screen not functioning, if one guesses the correct URL. Revising the reference above, to fill it out.... Checking it, it seems the HD is in Prospect Hill, except for one triangle of land holding the James Dwight Dana House. --doncram (talk) 14:14, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Once again, as I've said on other talk pages, the boundaries of the city's neighborhood planning maps don't effectively define real neighborhoods in New Haven. The map boundaries are arbitrarily defined by street centerlines, and those boundaries often are drawn to correspond to census tract boundaries. There are good reasons to use streets to separate planning maps, but that means that the boundaries sometimes depart from the actual boundaries of neighborhoods.
If you study maps of the Prospect Hill neighborhood (including topographic maps), you will see that Prospect Street is a 2-lane street (plus parking) on the crest of a hill, and that the city's map puts the two sides of the 2-lane street into different neighborhoods. The maps combine part of the west side of Prospect Street with an area that is physically separated from Prospect Street by a steep hillside. I don't know you think of neighborhoods in cities that you know well, but I have never encountered a place where people don't consider themselves to be in the same neighborhood as their across-the-street neighbors, but instead affiliate with a neighborhood that is separated by a rather steep hillside.
Regardless of what you have concluded from the city maps:

The entire Prospect Hill historic district is actually in the Prospect Hill neighborhood (has it occurred to you that this might have something to do with how the HD name was chosen?),
The entire Whitney Avenue historic district is in the East Rock neighborhood (note that the Prospect Hill and Whitney Avenue HDs are contiguous to one another and have many historical and architectural similarities, so neither of these factors provided a reason for drawing the boundary where it is; the boundary between the HDs clearly was determined by neighborhood affiliation, and it actually is a more accurate delineation of the actual neighborhood boundaries than the city planning maps provide), and
The entire Hillhouse Avenue historic district is on Prospect Hill. --Orlady (talk) 15:11, 6 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[nrhpinv3-1] Mary McCahon, J. Paul Loether, and John Herzan (December 17, 1984). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Hillhouse Avenue Historic District" (PDF). National Park Service.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) and Accompanying 22 photos, from 1979 and 1985

[nris-2] "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. 2009-03-13.

[3] Maps of the New Haven Neighborhoods (PDF) are available from the City of New Haven's City Plan Department. There are also quick traces from the above PDFs in [http://maps.google.com/?q=http://www.southernct.edu/departments/usc/offcampushousing/New_Haven_Neighborhoods.kml Google Earth/Map Shapes of the New Haven Neighborhoods] (KML).

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