'Completing' expressway is not likely

By David A. Smith

Standing in Waterbury's Colonial Plaza parking lot, Tom Hill, a commercial real estate broker, shows a map of the Route 8 corridor. The plaza is a stone's throw from Route 8's Exit 34.

They cross the imaginary line on a two-lane highway built in the late 1960's, when crews relocated Route 8 - along with the village of Colebrook River and the Dubois Cemetery - to make room for Colebrook River Lake. North or south of that stretch, motorists encounter a narrow, twisting, two-lane rural road - exactly the type of road officials replaced from Bridgeport to Winsted more than 30 years ago.

The four lane highway ends at Route 44 in Winsted, a seemingly short 16 miles from a connection with the Massachusetts Turnpike. That 16 miles twists, turns, dips and winds its way north through Colebrook and follows the Farmington River through the Massachusetts towns of Sandisfield and Otis, before finally meeting the turnpike, but passing under it on the way.

While its effect on downtowns may be up for discussion, the highway played a role in affecting development in towns along its path. In Torrington, for example, ease of access to the highway has been cited as a factor in the development boom on the east side.

Though the highway is not the only factor, more than a half-dozen national chains - Home Depot is the latest - have opened stores on East Main Street / Route 202 in the last few years alone. The bilk of the city's population lives on the east side, but the highway also fills a retail requirement by allowing ease of access, said Tom Hill, a commercial real estate broker with Drubner Industrials in Waterbury.

"The highway is one part of the equation", said Hill, who added clients such as manufacturers also want information on other costs, like payroll, a community's mill rate and utilities costs. "The highway gets them here, but when they get here, they want to know what it'll cost.

"Retailers want two things, " Hill said: access, to attract a regional market, and to congregate together. "It's because they're all there together. The key word is critical mass."

Other areas seeing similar development trends, where the highway helped play a role, include Thomaston's South Main Street, which saw construction of a Rite-Aid pharmacy, and an area off Exit 39, which features a new Dunkin' Donuts.

Hill said Bridge Steer in Naugatuck, with a CVS pharmacy and Blockbuster Video store, also may be in a similar situation.

"It isn't right on the on-ramp, "said Hill, "but it is a half-mile from it."

And in Waterbury, Hill said a good example is the highway's role in the potential development of a new ballpark. Two sites under consideration - Colonial Plaza on Thomaston Avenue and land south of Freight Street - rated highly because of their proximity to Route 8 and Interstate 84.

And Hill said he continually talks with developers who express interest in locating near Route 8 and I-84. The Huntingdon Avenue/Exit 36 area north of the city has also been explored, as have properties in the Brooklyn section of the city.

Today, Naugatuck, Torrington and other communities along the highway find themselves in the midst of revitalization. The highway, many argue, can play a major role in that revitalization and continues to play a big role in the region's development.

"For a company looking to relocate in the area from out of state, one key that draws them to this area is that easy access," Battistoni said. "The highway's a huge asset to the region, without a doubt."

Commuters also benefit from the highway. Roger Dickinson, president of Torrington Research Co., said about 75 percent of his workers commute from outside Torrington. Though not all use Route 8, those who do can take the highway to within a half-mile of the company's front door on Commercial Boulevard.

"It's a commuter route between the Waterbury area and Fairfield County," said Peter Dorpalen, executive director of the Council of Governments of the Central Naugatuck Valley in Waterbury. "The amount of commuting between Waterbury and Bridgeport and the Fairfield County area has increased."

Though they may not all commute on Route 8, roughly 11,000 workers commute daily from the 13 towns making up Central Naugatuck Valley planning region to the greater Bridgeport, Valley (Shelton, Derby, Ansonia and Seymour) or Southwest Coast regions, according to 1990 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. That number, roughly 9.1 percent of the region's estimated 124,000 commuters, is nearly double the amount in 1980.

And traffic counts compiled exclusively on Route 8 show a dramatic increase in use in the past quarter-century.

In one recent month, the average daily traffic count in Bridgeport totaled 76,4000, with that number dwindling to about 3,1000 on the two-lane stretch in Colebrook. By comparison, one of the most highly traveled sections in Bridgeport saw an average daily traffic count of about 49,1000 vehicles in 1974.

But not everyone looked forward to the highway's arrival.

"For a while, I was so sure about having to give up my service stations, I was out looking at other sites,", said Naugatuck's Chuck Waskowicz, who ran Chuck's Mobil in Union City for 25 years. "I was so sure I was going to be out of business, I took a course in radiator repair."

"The service station across the street went down the river," he said, and the highway now sits across the street from his former service station, now a Getty station.

And when the highway was moved around Beacon Falls in the late 1970s and early 1980s, removing through-traffic from the four-lane stretch passing through downtown, business owners there feared the worst. The $35.6 million project started in the summer of 1979 and continued through 1983.

"We all lost quite a bit of traffic, " said Michael Krenesky Sr., Beacon Falls municipal historian, who ran the H.W. Wilcox Pharmacy downtown for 23 years, retiring in 1987. "We experienced a problem when they bypassed us. It was very slow. There was nothing coming into town."

Fortunately, he recalled, the drop in traffic through downtown didn't force anyone out of business.

"There were a few up by the post office that were bleak for a while", he said, but businesses hung in there before giving way to a different change. "Seems like shortly after that, a few of us retired."

"Traffic used to be about 10 times as much as it is now," said Gabe Fuoco, who said the first six months after the highway's opening proved to be the worst for downtown businesses. "We didn't think we'd last two months."

Fuoco took over Gabe's Mobil Station on North Main Street, near the post office, about 15 years ago from his father, Gary, who had opened it in 1944. Gabe Fuoco said after the highway opened, traffic dropped from a thousand cars stopping in during the day to a couple hundred.

"Once people found out how to get off and get back on, a lot of the traffic came back, "he said. "I'd have to say 90 percent of it came back. And now, you don't have all of the congestion out on Main Street.

But did building a four-lane highway to ease travel re-route traffic and customers off the route that had led them from Main Street to Main Street? Changes downtown actually had more to do with changes in the local economy, many say.

"Like many places, the downtown is not what it used to be," said Ron Marciano of the Naugatuck Chamber of Commerce, noting downtown continued to thrive after completion of the highway. "At that time, downtown was very active and very busy."