Allan Appel photo
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.
Allan Appel Photo
“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.