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Allan Appel |
May 17, 2024 10:33 am
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Friends of Quarry Park friends Jane Coppock and Tracy Blanford.
A letter, which should have been alarming, arrived at the Parks Department.
It described a growing, layered mound of more than 5,000 square feet of dumped junk like mattresses, refrigerators, old play equipment and construction debris encroaching from private backyards into the public park land of Quarry Park Preserve in Fair Haven Heights.
That letter was dated February 28, 2002!
After more than 20 years, Tracey Blanford, who heads the Friends of Quarry Park Preserve and was the author of that letter, showed up to a parks commission meeting on Wednesday night.
She was polite and civil, and also simmering with two decades of frustrated advocacy over how to get the city to help keep the park clean.
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“I’m at the end of my rope. The dumping has grown more and more, deeper, thicker, higher,” Blanford reported at Wednesday’s Board of Park Commissioners meeting at 720 Edgewood Ave.
With a half-dozen members of her group in support, Blanford was on hand specifically to inquire about a promise made a year ago by the department to re-survey an area of the park, where the backyards of half a dozen private homes on the western side of Summit Street back into, via a semi-private road, the park land. That’s where they said the most egregious of the dumping is taking place.
Absent is that survey, Blanford said, which would confirm where private property ends and the park land begins. It appears the Livable City Initiative (LCI), Parks, and other city authorities have been loathe or unwilling (she does not know which or why) all these years to hold the private homeowners involved responsible.
Deputy Director of Parks and Public Works Stephen Hladun said on Wednesday that he had met with one of the city’s on-call engineering firms, visited the site, and he is waiting for a report.
“As soon as we get it, we’ll do the survey for boundaries,” he reported. A 1990 survey already exists, but the topography might have changed.
That was well and good, but Blanford expressed skepticism. She and fellow parks friends members Jane Coppock and Sean Langberg pressed Hladun over the course of the night about making sure the survey gets done.
“We were supposed to do this a year ago,” Blanfod said. “So when will the survey happen … six months, a year, ten?”
Hladun promised that the survey would move forward. “We’re on the right track.”
“We want to see if we can do it this summer,” said Parks Commissioner Carl Babb, “to bring some satisfaction.”
Coppock said she walks around the park all the time. “The dumping is worse and the pile is moving into the park.”
Where Summit Street dead ends at the park.
Blanford agreed. “We used to see refrigerators and mattresses. And now they’re covered with dirt.” Should she reach out to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection? she wondered.
“Yes!” said parks commissioner Harvey Feinberg. “Let’s get the state on our side.”
“I’ve been patient and civil for 20 years,” Blanford said later in the meeting. It’s time to get the survey done.
Under Blanford’s leadership, the park is becoming more appreciated as a kind of secret gem of New Haven, a place where dinosaurs walked (and deposited some of their bones now at the Peabody), Indigenous people had encampments, and a unique brownstone, known as New Haven redstone, was for a century quarried and now can be seen in steps and walls in dozens of buildings around the city.
It is increasingly the site for historic, geological, and nature hiking events organized through the Friends of Quarry Park.
Commissioners Harvey Feinberg and Carl Babb, vice chair.
In addition to the grave Summit side dumping problem, the Friends of Quarry Park work to clear invasive species and maintain the trails every Thursday from 4 to 6 p.m.
They’re also lobbying the city, in addition, to get better signage and parking spaces on Russell Street, the park’s official entrance.
Arthur Taylor at Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen's drop-in center in 2022.
Arthur Taylor brought the music — and an unflagging sense of urgency — to advocacy for the rights of unhoused people like himself.
He died at age 71 in a car crash this week while walking along an I‑91 travel lane, a few weeks after moving into the city’s new non-congregate shelter in a former hotel on Foxon Boulevard.
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Allan Appel |
Mar 14, 2024 4:30 pm
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The housing authority has officially purchased two Fair Haven Heights properties by the Quinnipiac River as part of its latest effort to redevelop long-underused city plots into new places to live.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 27, 2024 11:24 am
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Goode leads group into woods.
Aaron Goode of the New Haven Bioregional Group smiled at the roughly 30 people assembled in the parking lot of New Haven Friends Meeting on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven Heights, ready to hike.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Feb 6, 2024 5:51 pm
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Tenant Alisha Moore with her union on Tuesday: "We want real fixes."
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Jan 16, 2024 9:30 am
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2 Thorn St.
New Haven nursing home patients may fret less about flu season next year — if a Bronx-based assisted living company gets the green light to build 150 beds, pave half as many parking spaces and bring ultraviolet disinfection tech to the Hill neighborhood.
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Laura Glesby |
Dec 20, 2023 11:58 am
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Commissioners William Kilpatrick, Alberta Witherspoon, and Elmer Rivera at Tuesday's meeting.
The housing authority took one big step towards building 40 new mixed-income apartments and ground-floor retail space by the Quinnipiac River, as its board voted to spend $1.42 million to purchase an East Grand Avenue lot and nearby pizzeria.
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Thomas Breen |
Nov 3, 2023 4:37 pm
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Ward 11 alder candidates Gail Roundtree, Henry "Rodney" Murphy, and Ira Johnson.
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That means that Murphy — a Greater New Haven Transit District operations manager, embroidery enthusiast, and avid drone flyer — has just a few days to convince his neighbors to cast their ballots for him instead of for Republican challenger Gail Roundtree and write-in candidate Ira Johnson, both of whom have unsuccessfully run for local office before.
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Nora Grace-Flood and Dereen Shirnekhi |
Oct 24, 2023 9:19 am
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Ward 13 alder hopefules: Green challenger Paul Garlinghouse, Democratic incumbent Rosa Ferraro-Santana, and Republican challenger Deborah Reyes.
A three-way alder race in Fair Haven Heights pits an incumbent Democrat focused on parks against Green and Republican challengers raising concerns about single-party rule at City Hall.
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Thomas Breen |
Oct 23, 2023 5:00 pm
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Markeshia Ricks file photo
Ward 11 Alder Renee Haywood, on the campaign trail in 2017.
Renee Haywood, a long-time Bella Vista resident and advocate for the disabled who represented Ward 11 on the Board of Alders for nearly six years even as she underwent dialysis, died on Friday. She was 60.
Chris Murphy asks Raisa about her family as she shows him a photo of her daughter.
As 85-year-old Raisa pulled up a photograph of her daughter on her iPhone, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy took a break from walking across Fair Haven Heights to ask her a question.
A mysterious tube — carrying something out of a Clifton Street house’s sewage-flooding basement, through the backyard, over a neighbor’s fence, and out beside the Quinnipiac River, and installed without permits or permission from the riverbank property’s owner — led the Fair Rent Commission to drop two tenants’ monthly rents to $1 apiece.
It also put a convicted mortgage fraudster who is still involved in New Haven rental real estate back in the spotlight.
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Thomas Breen |
Sep 20, 2023 9:13 am
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92 Lexington Ave., recently sold for $2.25M.
A Waterbury-based holding company has purchased a 50-bed nursing home and residential care facility on Lexington Avenue for $2.25 million — and a Stamford-based contractor has bought a Westville ex-convent and 10-unit apartment-complex-to-be for $865,000 — in some of the city’s latest property deals.
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Laura Glesby and Allan Appel |
Sep 15, 2023 12:03 pm
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Surprised non-Democrat Anthony Carter, with Bella Vista moderator Patricia Solomon.
“I’ve been a Democrat all my life,” said May, an 81-year-old Newhallville resident who said she’s voted at Lincoln-Bassett School every election since she bought her home in 1985.
Except she wasn’t a Democrat on Tuesday. She found out from a moderator that she had been re-registered as an “unaffiliated” voter, ineligible to vote in the primary.
May was one of at least dozens of people across the city to find out on Tuesday that they couldn’t vote because they weren’t Democrats. To many, including May, that news came as an inexplicable surprise.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Aug 21, 2023 1:37 pm
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Friends Center teacher Karina Rojas, with fellow teacher Paris Pierce: “I have a goal to one day own my own home — and for my son to have his own room.”
Ian Christmann file photo
73 Howard, under construction last spring.
Early childcare provider Paris Pierce arrives to work on time and with a clear headspace — because her employer ensures the single mom has a safe home with two bathrooms, storage space, and a washing machine to care for herself and her three kids at no cost.
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Allan Appel |
Aug 21, 2023 12:17 pm
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Aaron Goode, Jean Webb, Marty Lendroth take on the jungle in the Heights.
It’s technically Ailanthus Altissima, or colloquially Tree of Heaven, but in Fair Haven Heights’ Fairmont Park it’s more often called, with a grrrrrrrr, as gardeners labor to uproot it, the Tree of Hell. Or from Hell.
But there’s now a lot less of this quick rising (thus toward heaven?) invasive Chinese species, and that’s thanks to decades of effort by Sylvia Dorsey and her stalwart crew of Friends of Fairmont Park.
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