Thomas MacMillan Photo
Willie Hoffman lays out the plan.
Edgewood Park’s natural splendor helped draw Juliet Avelin’s family to leave Vermont’s green mountains and relocate in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood. Then the news of an assault made her family start avoiding the park.
On Tuesday, she and her neighbors began the process of taking the park back.
Avelin was one of several dozen Edgewood Park neighbors who turned out Tuesday evening for an “Organizing Rally to help TAKE BACK THE PARK,” held at Edgewood School.
The event marked a re-booting of the Friends of Edgewood Park (FOEP) group, which unveiled a new organizational structure designed to help make the park more safe, welcoming, and fun.
The meeting was held partly in response to several incidents this summer, in which groups of teens on bikes attacked joggers.
“The bigger problem is perception,” said FOEP’s Jon Miller, who greeted people by the door to the Edgewood School’s cafeteria. The park is “actually fairly safe,” he said. But if people think it’s dangerous, they won’t go there, and then it will become dangerous, he said.
“We need to take back the perception of the park,” FOEP president Willie Hoffman announced from the cafeteria stage. People see it as unsafe and “dodgy,” but it’s in fact a “rare treasure of natural beauty and cultural diversity” and one of the safest areas in the city, he said.
Hoffman outlined FOEP’s new structure, centered on the goal of bringing more people to the park. Toward that end, FOEP is creating six “park teams” to focus on safety, recreation, infrastructure, grounds, preservation, program and events. Four “friends teams” will support the work of park teams by focusing on communications, fundraising, membership, and metrics.
Hoffman said the new structure is designed to help people find an entry point into getting involved, based on where their interests lie. Instead of asking people to “join generally,” FOEP 2.0 asks people to plug into the subgroup that most excites them.
Avelin said she moved to Westville in June, after taking a job as the new arts integration coordinator at Edgewood School. She said she takes her 5‑year-old son to the skate park to ride his bike. “But I’m very concerned” by the trash there and the profanity scrawled on the park.
“This park was a big draw” when her family moved from Putney, Vermont, Avelin said. Her husband use to commute by bike through Edgewood Park. He changed his route after cyclists were attacked, she said. “Which is a bummer.”
Miller said FOEP has been working to make the park more inviting by picking up litter and cleaning up graffiti.
FOEP’s Jessica Feinleib said the friends group hired eight local teens through the city’s Youth@Work program this summer. They planted about 20 trees, weeded beds, and picked up trash.
The friends are also working on installing a water fountain near the gazebo, basketball courts and tennis courts near the corner of Whalley and West Rock avenues, Feinleib said. The parks department has agreed to pay for $10,000 of the cost. The Regional Water Authority will pay for the $7,500 hook-up. But the project still needs about $7,000 more. Feinleib said the friends are hoping raise that money from the U.S. Tennis Association.
Two Parks
Billy Bromage (pictured), who attended the meeting with his 6‑month-old daughter Miriam, noted a couple of divisions in the park that could pose problems — or opportunities.
One is between the east and west sides of the park. A typical summer weekend will find a buzz of activity on the west side: the farmers market, people playing tennis and basketball, skateboarders in the skate park. A different set of people on the east side will be playing at the playground and sundial there. The middle of the park is often empty, a gulf between two different populations, Bromage said.
Bromage said people on the west side of the park tend to be more involved in FOEP. He suggested setting a “park-wide agenda,” to get people on all sides of the park more involved.
The second division is between Edgewood Park and West River Park, just to the south. Bromage said he’d like to see more connections between the two parks, “de-siloing” the work in each park and “coalescing” around a shared effort.
“I would like to see the two parks brought together,” agreed John Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick said he walks in Edgewood every day with his dog. He proposed to his wife near the duck pond, and married her in the meadow near the dog run.
The two parks complement each other, he said: Edgewood is “sculpted” and West River is more wild.