“It’s a big conflict here,” Will Cole said, looking at the cars parked bumper-to-bumper on both sides of his street. “This was a nice neighborhood at one point in time.”
Cole (pictured) and his wife Kristin Barber are two of several neighbors embroiled in a parking dispute that’s taken over their normally quiet dead-end lane in the Quinnipiac Meadows section of the city. It’s a conflict that’s recently led to angry confrontations and even some rudely placed fruit peels.
Hemingway Place, a narrow street off of Quinnipiac Avenue, has for the last two months seen a dramatic increase in its population of daytime parked cars. The spike in on-street parkers is due to the nearby construction of the Bishop Woods School, which is is nearing completion on Quinnipiac Avenue. Construction workers employed at the building site are parking their cars on both sides of Hemingway Place, leaving room for only one car at a time to squeak by.
Barber said that construction workers’ parked cars frequently block driveways, preventing residents from pulling out. This is a nuisance, she said, but the real problem is safety. The cars are parked right next to the driveways and all the way to the edge of Quinnipiac Avenue, Barber said. This allegedly prevents drivers from seeing if there are cars coming and makes leaving one’s driveway or turning onto Quinnipiac Avenue a blind leap of faith.
Hemingway Place’s parking troubles landed in front of the City Plan Commission on Wednesday night. The commission was hearing a request from Quinnipiac Meadows Alderman Gerald Antunes to create a parking zone for Hemingway, so that non-resident motorists would need a permit to park on the street. The parking proposal requires approval from the Board of Aldermen.
The City Plan Commission voted on Wednesday to recommend that the Board of Aldermen take no action until the fall, when school construction is scheduled to be completed.
The expectation is that the street will clear up once the construction workers pack up their tools and move on to the next job. The City Services and Environmental Policy committee will consider the matter tonight.
Lori Wentz lives at 11 Hemingway Place. Speaking from behind her screen door on Wednesday, she told the story of a fruit-tainted feud between her husband, Nick, and the parking construction workers.
Her husband is a self-employed landscaper, she said, and he has a big truck and trailer that he has to pull out of the driveway every morning. That’s been nearly impossible lately. With parked cars directly next to the driveway, he can’t make the turn. “He can’t work because cars are blocking him in,” Wentz said.
Wentz said that when her husband requested that construction workers not park so close to the driveway, things degenerated into shouting and cursing. “My husband had a confrontation with one of them,” she said. Since then, he’s put out a big orange traffic cone to keep his turning area free of parked cars. Recently, apple cores and banana peels started showing up perched on top of the cone, which Wentz interprets as a sign of disrespect left by construction workers.
“It’s rude, you know? It’s just annoying,” Wentz said.
Wentz said she doesn’t have a problem with her street being used for parking by construction workers, as long as they leave room for her husband to pull out of the driveway. She expects the trouble will end once the school is finished being built.
Nancy Riley (at left in photo), who lives next door at 15 Hemingway Place, feels the same way. “These guys [the construction workers] are just trying to make a living,” she said. “Nah, it doesn’t bother me.”
Riley said that she’s against implementing a residents-only parking zone, which she worries will make it harder for her to have family members stop by and park on the street. “I don’t want a permit,” she said. “I don’t think that’s fair to the people that live here.”
Riley said that disputes between workers and residents have been mostly just shouting, but she worried that one recent confrontation nearly escalated to violence. “The fruit on the cone’s not helping either,” she said.
Across the street, Will Cole said he’s having a tougher time with the parking problem, and the trouble goes beyond parking. There’s been an increase in garbage on the street, he said, and recently someone dumped four empty drink cartons on his lawn.
Like his wife, Cole said the largest issue is safety. An emergency on the street brought a fire truck and an ambulance to Hemingway Place on a recent Sunday, he said. If it had been a weekday, when the cars are lining the street, “they would never have gotten through.”
“You should see the garbage trucks when they come through here,” Cole said.
Several hours later, at the City Plan Commission meeting, Cole’s wife gave the commissioners an opportunity to see just that. Kristin Barber presented them with a photograph of a city garbage truck carefully backing its way down Hemingway Place, narrowly avoiding the parked cars lining the street. She said that the sanitation workers have complained to her about how hard the parked cars make their job.
After the commissioners made their unanimous recommendation that the Board of Aldermen put off consideration of the parking proposal until after school opens in the fall, Barber stepped out of the meeting room and into the hallway. “I don’t know if we’ll get to September,” she said.
She said she’s sure there’ll be an accident on her street before the fall.
“I think it’s dangerous,” she said. “I’m talking safety.” She described the fear of pulling “blindly” out onto Quinnipiac Avenue when parked cars obstruct her vision.
There will be a public hearing on the parking proposal at City Hall at 6:30 p.m. tonight before the Board of Aldermen’s City Services and Environmental Policy Committee.