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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.
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Laura Glesby and Thomas Breen |
Apr 26, 2024 4:14 pm
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Alex Nieves checks out a freshly-cleaned portable toilet on Thursday afternoon.
An accumulation of feces, old clothes, and drug paraphernalia prompted the city to increase the number of portable restrooms on the New Haven Green from two to six, as city officials search for a more permanent bathroom solution.
Only one kind of grass allowed for public mower job hopefuls.
City of New Haven job posting
Pre-employment drug test required for seasonal parks caretaker job.
If you want to make $18 an hour cutting grass in the city’s parks this summer, then you better not smoke grass before applying for the job.
Because New Haven requires prospective seasonal parks workers to pass a drug test, including for marijuana, even though recreational cannabis is now legal statewide.
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Kamini Purushothaman |
Feb 29, 2024 2:58 pm
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Tom Breen Photo
Round 2's coming: Jovon Ladson navigates concrete quarter pipe added in the previous round of skateboarder-city-designed renovations.
Skateboarders young and old envisioned stairs, an awning, and 24/7 lights as they met with city officials to map out a plan for a $250,000 renovation of their park.
by
Brian Slattery |
Jan 31, 2024 9:40 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Davis and Burgess.
On Tuesday morning, Peter Davis, a volunteer river keeper with the city parks department, and fellow volunteer David Burgess were over the edge of the slope off Diamond Street in Beaver Hills, lugging a dilapidated couch out of the woods. Around them was a thin carpet of other discarded objects. Among the trash bags were a fan, a decaying rug, a mattress, a rusting wheelchair.
It was a lot of garbage. Davis and Burgess were taking it one piece at a time.
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Laura Glesby |
Jan 30, 2024 3:13 pm
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X'Nique suggests to City Engineer Giovanni Zinn that city prioritize shade and sensory play.
A tire swing. A skate park. “A lot of butterflies.” And toys promoting “sensory play.”
Neighborhood children eagerly offered those visions for a planned redesign of Kensington Playground, following years of adult-dominated debates over the future of the park.
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Allan Appel |
Jan 29, 2024 10:03 am
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Anthropology major Chris Kowalski (above) and Aaron Goode (below) de-vine by Beaver Brook.
Brian Slattery Photo
Clip high, clip low, create a window. Also don’t be a Tarzan and pull on those cut vines lest you disturb insect habitats or the birds high in the trees above.
Those were among the illuminating arboricultural tips offered for some serious de-vining of New Haven’s invasive-threatened native oaks, maples, sycamores, and hackberry trees growing on a beautiful but under-loved patch of city-owned forested greenspace.
Parks staffer Janice Parker, right, explains the department's current structure.
A public-private funding structure. A “superintendent of fields.” A department divided into geographical districts, each with a point person for neighbors to contact.
Those ideas are all on the table as the city moves forward with a plan to un-merge the Parks and Public Works Department.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Dec 7, 2023 9:07 am
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Nora Grace-Flood photo
URI's Chris Ozyck solicits public parks feedback at 200 Orange.
Pick up more litter, clean the bathrooms better, and designate more point people to deal with public park concerns.
Those are some of the top priorities New Haveners have for their city’s green spaces, as documented in a community input process overseen by the Urban Resource Initiative on behalf of the Elicker administration.
A splash pad, swing set, and children’s play area are en route to Fairmont Park, thanks to playground upgrade plans for the Fair Haven Heights greenspace.
Tashi at work planting cherry blossoms in Wooster Sq.
Drenched in sweat, Tashi loaded up a wheelbarrow with nutrient-dense wood chips and mulch from a truck, ready to wheel it to his tree planting crew in Wooster Square. Although the work wasn’t glamorous or pretty, it would be worth it in the spring when the cherry tree’s blossoms come into bloom. Until then, the newly planted trees would have to rest and gain their energy under the autumn sun.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Oct 20, 2023 12:19 pm
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Paul Bass photo
David Belowsky: Vote no to charter revisions — and let him live out his life on the city's Board of Park Commissioners.
Lawn signs opposing changes to the city’s charter have started popping up around town — after the chair of New Haven’s parks commission printed 25 “Vote No” placards in a bid to preserve his lifetime seat on the volunteer body that oversees public greenspaces.
That man, David Belowsky, isn’t the only New Havener paying attention to this year’s general election ballot question.
A newly installed 988 sign on the Ferry Street Bridge.
Three hopeful numbers will be posted atop East Rock Park, in a sign urging those who are considering harming themselves to reach out to a new national suicide-prevention hotline instead.
At Wednesday's parks commission meeting: this crew doesn't have power over summit road.
The Elicker administration — and not the parks commission — will have the final say over whether or not the road to the top of East Rock Park remains largely closed to cars, and open to pedestrians and cyclists only.
The mayor said he has received widespread community support for keeping the road largely closed to cars, so he plans not to make a change.
Acting Director Rebecca Bombero: Consultant-led process "could lead to a reconfiguration" of parks-public works.
The Elicker administration is moving towards a potential un-merging of the parks and public works departments — or an entirely different parks-service setup altogether — by seeking a consultant to host community conversations around how City Hall should tend its public greenspaces.
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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.
by
Mia Cortés Castro |
Jul 20, 2023 3:03 pm
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Thomas Breen Photo
After a months-long debate and impasse over whether to fully reopen the road up to the summit of East Rock Park, the Board of Park Commissioners may have stumbled upon a solution: a magic bus.
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Allan Appel |
Jul 5, 2023 12:18 pm
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Allan Appel photos
Pablo Sumba, marveling at the mouth of a freshly caught porgy ...
... at Lighthouse Point Park on the day before July 4th.
Pablo Sumba and his family left their land-locked home in Waterbury early in the morning to fit in as many waterfront activities as they could during a pre-holiday trip to Lighthouse Point Park — including fishing, swimming, grilling (some of the 12 porgies they caught), and just hanging out with five-month-old baby Lucas, who lay on a blanket on the green grass nearby.
by
Asher Joseph |
Jul 3, 2023 11:14 am
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Asher Joseph photos
Ranezmay (right) and her friends delight in the spouts of water on the splash pad ...
... as volunteers prepare to mulch a nearby patch of dirt.
The sound of rustling leaves merged with squeals of joy and the gurgling of the Kensington Playground splash pad as a light mist wafted through the heavy heat. Despite the stifling smog that hung in the air, neither the Friends of Kensington Playground clean-up volunteers nor the neighborhood’s kids let it deter them from rejoicing in the beauty of a recently saved public park.
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Asher Joseph |
Jun 26, 2023 4:59 pm
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Asher Joseph photo
Sierra Welch, a participant of New Haven's Youth @ Work program, with her handy clippers.
Stalks snapped as tie-dye-clad Sierra Welch hunched over a cluster of Japanese knotweeds, wrenching the invasive plant out of the ground off a beaten path in Edgewood Park on Monday afternoon.
