How ​“Mr.” Hass Broke The Barrier

When ​“Mr. Christy Hass” showed up for an interview for a man’s job, it was too late to send her home.

She made a case for why she could run parks and rec. And she was hired.

Christy Hass never said she was a man when she applied for that job in the town of Rocky Hill. She didn’t say she was a woman either. She simply didn’t say.

As a result she broke a gender boundary, becoming Connecticut’s first female parks and rec chief.

For the next four decades, she kept going — and breaking boundaries in what had been an exclusively male domain: supervising municipal parks workers and building projects.

She broke some of those boundaries here in New Haven, where she has served as the first female deputy parks director and tree warden since 1999.

During that time, she has overseen the renovation and opening up to the public of the Lighthouse Park carousel and East Rock Soldiers & Sailors Monument, arranged for the 14,600-pound holiday tree to be transported to the Green and dressed in almost 30,000 light bulbs, modernized the East Rock Park workshop and Pardee Rose Garden, figured out how to keep parks clean with a budget sliced in half, wrestled with United Illuminating to save city trees, helped Newhallville neighbors reclaim a Cherry Ann Street park, and pulled all-nighters to help dig New Haven out of the past three years’ serial superstorms.

She is now clearing out her office. She worked her last day just before Christmas and, after counting vacation time, officially retires on Feb. 29.

She’s stepping down to spend more time with her family, including helping to take care of two grandchildren and taking long-deferred vacations with her husband, also a retired parks chief (of North Haven).

The volunteers who tend to neighborhood parks will miss her.

Peter Webster will miss being able to call Hass about a light out at Wooster Square Park, then seeing it fixed the next day. He spoke of how she helped him and other neighbors organize the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, with enough trash receptacles and pick-up; and how she saved some endangered trees while quickly seeing that sick trees got removed. He recalled how she got parks plows out promptly in recent superstorms to clear fallen trees and help clear the streets. He said she even enlisted him to report back to her on whether crews would show up on time.

“She understood that parks are like the lungs of the city. She knew her trees. She knew the parks,” Webster said. ​“On a scale of one to ten, I would say ​‘ten.’”

“I think she did a great job,” said Stephanie Fitzgerald of Friends of Edgewood Park. She recalled Hass delivering an opening, and forceful, argument for protecting trees at a public hearing about a UI trimming plan, then following through. ​“We were always emailing her and saying, ​‘There’s trash to be picked up here.’ Or ​‘you really need to do this.’ And she was always very responsive. She always had great ideas.

“I enjoyed her enthusiasm.”

Hass’s enthusiasm for the job remained in high gear as she looked back on her career during an interview over coffee at Edgewood Avenue’s Deja Brew.

“The passion is hard to let go of,” said Hass, who’s 66. ​“How do I redirect that? That’s the hard part of retiring.”

The hard part of entering the field involved cracking the gender barrier. She learned about that barrier on a Massachusetts farm, when her father told her, ​“Get in the house.”

“You’re A Girl”

Hass grew up working on her family’s farm in Rehoboth, Mass. She was the child who most enjoyed helping out. So she got to herd pigs, care for the cattle. ​“My father treated me like I was a son.”

Until that day he told her to go inside. Hass had turned 16 years old at the time.

“Why?” she asked her father.

“You’re a girl,” he responded.

“You’re telling me that now?”

Dad worried about his daughter socializing with the male laborers on the farm. He relented a bit — she could work outside when no one else was around. Otherwise, she was relegated to the indoors.

“It was a stunning revelation,” Hass recalled. ​“But it set me up for what was going to happen later on.”

Like when people started asking her — as young women were always asked back then — ​“Are you going to be a nurse? A teacher? Or are you going to find a husband?”

As a student at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, she determined to find another answer.

It was the height of the late-‘60s protest movement, a time of fast-changing norms.

Hass entered freshman year in a women’s‑only dorm with a midnight curfew, with no male visitors allowed past the first floor. By the time of her 1971 graduation, the dorms were coed.

Along the way, she saw how old-fashioned gender norms could cut both ways. She remembered sitting with fellow students watching draft numbers being announced on TV. She looked around the room and ​“saw faces turn gray. I’m sitting here not worrying about it. I thought, ​‘That’s not fair.’”

She settled on a career path: parks and rec. She had always loved organizing events — chorales, plays, the talent show at Anawan Junior High.

She applied for parks and recs jobs after graduation. She broke in through the ​“women’s” slot, becoming women’s and girls recreation supervisor in North Haven in 1973.

She decided she wanted more. She applied for parks and rec director positions. She didn’t make it to even the interview stage.

Until she decided to reapply for the open position in Rocky Hill, Conn. She had written previously and not heard back. This time she didn’t identify her gender in the letter. She was aware that a ​“Christy” could be a man or a woman.

She didn’t put her official title of North Haven women’s and girls recreation supervisor in the letter. She wrote that she worked as a ​“recreation supervisor.” ​“Which was true,” she noted. ​“I just left out a couple of words.”

This time she got a letter back from Rocky Hill. ​“Dear Mr. Hass,” it read. ​“Please come for an interview.”

“Facilities Management”

She showed up, she made her case — and she lasted 22 years. No other community in Connecticut had had a female parks chief, she said. She was the only female at regional professional gatherings.

In Rocky Hill, she developed and ran summer camps, dance and music programs. At first she had $4,000 a year in program money to work with. She ended up overseeing $400,000 a year in rec programs, which paid for themselves, she said.

For the last five years, Hass pushed for creation of a new position, facilities manager, that she filled as well. She oversaw construction of a high school and renovation of a junior high school, the kind of job men traditionally did.

When she started that position, she heard from the custodians that they felt unappreciated in the town.

At the time she was organizing a parade for Rocky Hill’s 375th birthday. ​“I’m going to get you new uniforms,” she told the custodians. ​“I’m going to call you ​‘facilities management.’ I want you to march in the parade.” Which they did.

Along the way, she and those with whom she worked had to get used to what it meant to have a woman in the role.

She showed up to address the City Council seven months after the birth of her daughter Sarah.

“Hey babe, you’re in a delicate condition,” the mayor told her. ​“We’ll let you go first.”

Hass didn’t appreciate the remark, no matter how well-intentioned. ​“I’ve never been in a delicate condition in my life!” she thought.

But she accepted the mayor’s offer. ​“If you’re going to suffer with it, you might as well” take the benefits, she said.

Another time a city councilman who had had ​“a little bit to drink” headed for the bathroom during a meeting break — and ​“grabbed me and danced me down the corridor.”

How did she react?

“You did what you always do: You extricate and walk away.” Filing a complaint, she said, ​“wouldn’t work. You decide how much you can take,” and you take it, keeping an eye on the goal of succeeding in the job. Which she did.

A Wary Welcome

By the time Sarah entered college in the late 1990s, Hass was ready for a bigger challenge, a job in a bigger city. So when New Haven’s parks chief, Bob Levine, recruited her for the city’s deputy position, she jumped at the chance. She began the job (official title: deputy director of parks and squares) in 1999.

Again, she was the first woman in the post. Levine brought her to the greenhouse/maintenance center by the Pardee Rose Garden at the foot of East Rock, where Hass would be stationed, to meet the laborers she would supervise. All but one of the 46 caretakers at the time were male.

“They were all in the dock” glaring at her as she pulled up in a truck, she recalled. They had their arms folded. ​“I stepped out of the truck. I had my suit on. I remember thinking, ​‘One step at a time. Let’s face this.’”

The men grilled her: How many people had she supervised before? Had she ever done this kind of job?

And she did butt heads with the union over the years, over enforcing work rules. One regret as she leaves her job is that New Haven’s department didn’t enjoy the kind of labor-management cooperation found in smaller communities like Rocky Hill.

But she also oversaw a modernization of the facility, so that the laborers could now shower there and go the bathroom indoors (with a women’s bathroom as well).

She learned not to let union officials rile her at meetings, not to ​“let my buttons get pushed.”

She also learned how important trees are to people in the city. In smaller towns, most trees, especially newer trees, are planted on private property. Denser New Haven has some 30,000 street trees. The Connecticut Urban Forest Council gave Hass its Fred Borman Award in 2013 for her ​“leadership, dedication and hard work in the practice of urban forestry.”

People have passionate views about how the city should deal with them, Hass discovered. Some don’t like acorns or leaves falling on their property, or notice diseased trees looking precarious, and want the trees cut down. Others want trees saved — for instance when UI had a mandate from the governor after the recent superstorms to trim trees around wires in danger of being felled. A protracted battle ensued with the public; Hass led a successful effort to work with the utility to visit each tree and prevent unnecessary downings.

Hass is proud of that; she said the city has developed a good working relationship with both the utility and the neighbors on how to approach trimming. On many fronts, Hass said, she loved working with neighborhood parks groups and tree-planting and monitoring outfits like Urban Resources Initiative (URI).

She’s proud of how a parks staffer named Sabrina Bruno — one of the ​“strong women” who gradually entered the department over the years — turned the decaying Lighthouse carousel into a thriving wedding facility hosting up to 98 events a year, along with a restored carousel itself. Overall, Hass worked hard to open up spots like Lighthouse and East Rock Park more to the public. (Here’s how the Independent’s Lucy Gellman last summer described Hass’s role in the revived annual July 4 fireworks display: she was ​“the unspoken maven of the fireworks show. After months of planning and contracts with Atlas PyroVisions, she had spent the morning and afternoon shuttling between Wilbur Cross, downtown, and the summit of East Rock, checking in with law enforcement officials, coordinating the U.S. Coast Guard Band’s arrival from New London, and setting up for the entertainment below. She does it year after year, she said, for the impact the show leaves on New Haveners.”)

Hass said she’s also proud that even though the department lost 49 of its 105 total employees, and 22 of its 46 laborers, during her time here, the department managed to use better equipment and more efficient routes to get the job done.

Camp Wakawaka

Over the past three years she found herself the point parks person at the Emergency Operations Center as climate change brought superstorm after superstorm to New Haven — the biggest blizzard in over 100 years, two tropical storms, a freak October snowstorm, among others. She worked directly with public works’ Jeff Pescosolido to clear the streets, sending smaller parks vehicles to streets public works’ larger trucks couldn’t handle, receiving help from those larger vehicles for open swaths of park property. She said she loved that spirit of cooperation.

She found herself and top aides sleeping on the floor at the office for one, two, three nights on end during those storms. ​“I called it Camp Wakawaka,” she said. After a few nights, she and the crew brought in air mattresses. She was getting too old for the hard floor. Still, she found the work exciting, and rewarding.

It also kept her away from her family. As did late-night calls about downed trees. Now, she said, she’s giving back the time owed.

She has already received calls about new job opportunities. Give me a few months, she said. At some point she’ll get busy again — but not as busy. She doesn’t intend to return to full time work.

But don’t be surprised to see Ms. Christy Hass outside somewhere, directing work somewhere, before the year’s up.