People dig these tunnels

Pippa Jack

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Pippa Jack

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For 38 years, passengers at New Haven’s Union Station have walked through a distinctive pair of ovoid metallic tunnels (above) that feel something like a 1980s Amtrak train turned inside out. In April, Connecticut’s Department of Transportation caused an uproar when it announced plans to replace the futuristic tunnels with a more conventional green-and-white-tile tunnel with a rectilinear profile, part of a $400 million project that will also put canopies over the station’s tracks. 

Fans of the shiny tunnels, which were designed by the late architect and Yale professor Herbert S. Newman ’59MArch, took to social media to call for their preservation. Newman’s son Peter Newman ’90MArch, who recently retired from the firm his father founded, says the tunnels have become “part of the collective memory of our community.” “My dad was a romantic,” he says, “and the tunnels were intended as a celebration of arrival and departure and the spaces in between.” 

The DOT collected comments about the project online and at an April 14 public meeting; no word yet on the tunnels’ fate.