Allan Appel photo
Volunteer Kevin McCarthy and Tusker Pickett at the Trowbridge Environmental Center Thursday.
Years ago when Anna Pickett was potty-training her boys, taking them walking outside could be a challenge because she was always on the look-out for a bathroom.
Back then if she was in the College Woods area of East Rock Park, she often could not find one.
No longer — thanks to a city effort to reopen long-shuttered public parks buildings and turn them into active community centers. With working bathrooms.
Last Saturday morning as she was helping to host the just-inaugurated monthly open house at the bright and refurbished East Rock Park’s Trowbridge Environmental Center, a young mom called out to her, “You have everything we need: coffee, bagels, and a bathroom.”
Pickett was on hand Thursday afternoon with her very well trained sons Haven and Tusker to inaugurate yet another activity at the center, a nature book club.
All this activity is emerging not only in East Rock but at seven other vacant or under-utilized city-owned buildings, which the city is converting into community centers for people of all ages. That’s thanks to part of a $10 million federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allocation that the Board of Alders recently approved for a mix of youth engagement initiatives.
Click here to read about the initial announcement in August and the call for RFPs from area non-profits to partner with the city’s Youth and Recreation Department to provide programming.
Pickett is the development and outreach manager of the Yale University-affiliated Urban Resources Initiative (URI).
In October, URI received one of the contracts to fill the Trowbridge Environmental Center with programming on Tuesdays (Junior Explorers Club), Thursdays (Nature Book Club), and Saturdays (open house, tree identification walks, and clean-ups). That contract goes through the end of June 2023.
Anna Pickett with son Haven.
Another non-profit, Monk Youth Jazz and STEAM Collective, scored the contract to provide STEM and art programming in the building on the other days of the week, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Their jazz programming is scheduled to begin on Nov. 20 in the shining and inviting new space, complete with a once shuttered, now open, double picture window that looks onto the gracious expanse of the park toward the river.
And a spiffy new/old space it is. The city’s role at East Rock’s nature center has been to provide new paint, a new ceiling, comfortable heat (which was necessary on Thursday’s blustery late afternoon), and a reliable bathroom.
Pickett says the indoor bathroom has been there but was never regularly available to the public as it will be now, and it was certainly not looking as shiny and suitable for potty trainers as it does now.
As Dave Cruz-Bustamante, a Wilbur Cross junior who is also one of the student representatives on the Board of Education, read with 9‑year-old Haven Pickett, 11-year-old Tusker explored the contents of the new bookshelves in the center’s corridors. He also checked out the two terrariums of indoor plants.
Both those amenities and others have been provided by volunteers from Friends of East Rock Park (FERP) who have also decorated the walls of the center with displays of ye olde New England bugs, birds, and framed scenes of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument atop East Rock from when the statue was dedicated in 1887.
While the attendance for the first session of the nature book club on Thursday was modest, Pickett said 80 people attended the initial Saturday open house, 30, including the happy mother of potty-trainees, attended last Saturday, and 30 are already signed up for a fall park clean up and bulb planting on Nov. 19. (Registration is still open for a Dec. 1 winter tree identification walk here.)
The contract with the city, which runs through June, is a pilot, said Pickett, and how to build an audience at the 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. Thursday hour is a work in progress. Bustamante is helping her reach out to the Wilbur Cross kids, who can get community service credit for participation.
Already very much in the pipeline for the activities will be patients at the Fair Haven Community Health Center (FHCHC). Pickett said long before URI applied for the city grant for the East Rock Nature Center programming, URI has been developing a relationship with FHCHC.
“Did you know they [FHCHC] are writing prescriptions to spend more time in nature? To send their patients here. Did you know being in nature improves eyesight, promotes fitness, and lowers blood pressure? So this is the birth of that relationship.”
Dave Cruz-Bustamante (right) with Haven Pickett.
A curious reporter, who lives near FHCHC, asked why the health center doesn’t encourage their clients to go to the closer green space, Quinnipiac River Park, for exercise; it is nearly adjacent to the clinic.
“Because there’s no bathroom!” Pickett replied.
“Here they can go to the bathroom and get warm” before or after participants go on what’s being called their “hike for health,” lead by volunteers from FHCHC.
Click here to read about and to sign up for activities that include a Dec. 3 open house hosted by FERP and on Dec. 10 a wreath and candle making workshop hosted by the city’s Youth and Recreation Department.
In August Youth and Recreation Department Director Gwen Busch Williams said that of the eight buildings the city is in the process of renovating and converting, East Rock’s Trowbridge Environmental Center, the Barnard Nature Center, and Coogan Pavilion in Edgewood Park would be the first to reopen because all three require more cosmetic than structural work. The rest, she added, would be up and running with programming by the end of next year.