Brian Slattery Photos
As the Olin Corporation, with oversight from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), continues its testing at Six Lakes, a.k.a the Powder Farm, to determine the extent of contamination from decades of arms testing and waste dumping, Six Lakes Coalition has finished a round of its own surveying — for community input into what neighboring residents would like the future of the now-forested acreage in southern Hamden to look like.
The resulting report finds that “neighbors desire public open space at Six Lakes that will allow them safe access to a quiet, natural area and provide a gathering space for the local community.” The report was feted Wednesday morning at a gathering at the edge of the property, in which local and state officials reiterated their support for the effort to turn Six Lakes into a public park.
The view of Six Lakes from Leeder Hill Drive.
As the report details, “Six Lakes is a 102.5‑acre parcel in Hamden, Connecticut, featuring a mature oak-pine forest and six beautiful ponds. Early in the 20th century, the property was used by Winchester Repeating Arms Company for gunpowder storage and munitions testing. Later, portions of the site served as a dump for battery waste, solvents, and other industrial materials, leaving localized contamination. In 1931, Winchester was purchased by the Olin Corporation, which still owns Six Lakes, though operations there ceased in the 1960s.”
The idea of creating a natural space emerged not long after Olin stopped using the land for arms testing and waste dumping. “The Hamden Land Conservation Trust first approached Olin about acquiring the property for a park in 1969,” the report states, though no results came from those initial conversations. With no human activity on the land, it slowly but surely became the pond-laced forest that it is today.
Another round of cleaning up the property — then known colloquially as the Powder Farm — began in 1986, when “the state Department of Environmental Protection (now DEEP) and Olin signed a consent order for cleanup, and Olin performed some work in the early 1990s,” the report states. That effort stalled, for reasons that remain unclear (read more about that here). Then, “in the early 2000s, DEEP and Olin agreed to divert attention from Six Lakes to a cleanup of pollution in the adjacent Newhall neighborhood, whose marshes were filled with industrial and municipal waste by Winchester and the Town of Hamden over decades before the area was developed in the 1950s with modest single-family homes for predominantly Black, working class families. The Newhall cleanup was mostly completed, but the emotional legacy of contamination lingers.”
Since 1986, however, the consent order has remained in force, and in June 2023, DEEP officials announced that they were revisiting “older legacy cases” and had brought Olin “back to the table” to complete the remediation of Six Lakes. As the Six Lakes update states, “Today, Olin is conducting new tests at Six Lakes in order to create a remediation plan, overseen by DEEP. Following the necessary cleanup, Six Lakes could safely become a public park — a green oasis connected to an extensive urban trail system that includes the adjacent Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.”
Coinciding with DEEP’s renewed attention to the property, the Six Lakes Park Coalition — which includes community and environmental nonprofits, churches, and the Town of Hamden — formed to revisit the idea broached decades ago to turn the Powder Farm into a park once it is remediated. As Justin Farmer, then-representative for Newhall on Hamden’s legislative council, said at the time, “returning thePowder Farm to the residents is an opportunity to invest in the Newhall community and allow southern Hamden to have healthy open space.” It was also a chance to address the environmental harm done to the community in the past. “This is what restorative justice would look like,” Farmer said.
Part of the question about the future of the parcel of land revolves around how much remediation the site undergoes, and how much is needed to make it a park. Almost all the land is currently zoned as open space, with one acre zoned for industrial/commercial use. The 1986 consent order requires Olin to remediate the property only for industrial and commercial use. Residential use requires a higher standard of remediation — that is, more (and more expensive) cleanup. It also happens to be the standard that would be best suited for parkland and recreational use. The level of remediation thus depends in part on what plans are in place for the land after the cleanup happens.
Graph from the Six Lakes report.
The Six Lakes Park Coalition has the support of local and state officials to turn the land into a park. But what does the community want? This summer, the coalition held a series of community meetings and conducted surveys to find out. Four workshops were held in different locations in Hamden, with further surveys conducted at community events, door-to-door, and through email and social media. In total, 91 residents attended the workshops and another 371 people filled out Six Lakes’s survey.
Both workshop and survey participants wanted, first and foremost, a place to walk, hike, and bird watch. Ideas emerged as well for educational programs — “school field trips, afterschool and adult programs, creation of a nature center or discovery museum, and research by university students.” Participants also valued the property as a chance to “connect neighborhoods”; as the report states, “the word ‘multigenerational’ was used several times, and many invoked the idea of a family-friendly, kid-friendly space.”
“The community wants this polluted property to be cleaned up by its owner, the Olin Corporation, swiftly and thoroughly. Steps must be taken to expedite the process after 50 years of little action,” the report continues. To see a park become a reality involves expanding the scope of testing to encompass the entire property and “engaging all involved parties — Olin, DEEP, the Town of Hamden, and the community” — with “regularly scheduled meetings to negotiate a solution that will open this property to the public.” (See the full report here.)
State and local officials in attendance on Wednesday included State Sen. and President Pro Tem Martin Looney; Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett; Laurie Sweet, state representative-elect and chair of Hamden’s Environment and Conservation Committee; Steven Winter, state representative-elect and New Haven’s executive director of climate and sustainability; and Jameson Foulk, outreach assistant to U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy. Justin Farmer, representing Six Lakes Coaliton, presented Looney with 2,110 signatures for a petition to turn Six Lakes into a park, “collected in the sun and rain — no snow as of yet,” he said. He noted Looney has been a “great champion of this issue.”
“It has not been lost on us” that “the state has worked tirelessly for the last four years to move this process along,” Farmer said.
Garrett expressed her conviction regarding the asset Six Lakes would be to the area once it was remediated and “opened up.”
“We know that having more open spaces is a health benefit to the community, and Hamden needs this,” Garrett said, lauding Six Lakes Coalition for “harnessing the energy and advocacy of our own community to work with the state to get this project accomplished.”
“There is a rich potential here,” Looney said, and “the state government and DEEP are aware of that.” Even though “there is a great deal of remediation that needs to be done here … the state recognizes that this is something that really needs to happen” in preserving the space as a natural area. “Everyone knows this is a gem that needs to be polished,” and “can be turned into a wonderful open space for the greater New Haven area.”