New Haven Independent

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Since 1996, I have been involved with trying to convert the old Farmington Canal rail line into a recreational greenway for cyclists, hikers, and neighborhood residents. Often, when I tell people about our vision for the greenway—a continuous off-road path from New Haven to Northampton, Mass.—their eyes open wide with the idea of an open space that could stretch for 80 miles.

Eyes opened considerably wider this weekend in New Haven, when the group with one of the most intriguing visions for the future of American cities came to town for its annual meeting. About 100 residents from around the region and up and down the East Coast attended sessions at New Haven City Hall, walks along the Farmington Canal, and a dinner at the New Haven Colony Historical Society sponsored by the East Coast Greenway Alliance. The Alliance aims to connect the Farmington Canal Greenway and similar trails in other cities into a 2,600-mile off-road path from Maine to Florida.

Some things in cities don’t change. New Haven still needs some of the more tangible improvements to compete —- a more useful airport, better job training programs for our kids, and, yes, better rail connections. (Wasn’t the Acela supposed to let you get to New York in an hour?) But the enthusiasm for the East Coast Greenway palpable at the conference this weekend — and reflected in the recent allocation of nearly $7 million in new funding for the Farmington Canal Greenway in the recent federal transportation bill, thanks to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and U.S. Sens. Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman — is grounded in something quite real.

The Greenway Alliance’s executive director, Karen Votava, and her colleagues chose New Haven for their annual meeting this year partly in recognition of Connecticut’s striking recent progress in building its parts of the East Coast Greenway. That progress was evident at the meeting, with participants walking down the completed stretch of the Farmington Canal near The Homes at Monterey and listening to speeches from a wide range of local officials who clearly understand the importance of greenways after years of advocacy by local residents. Several people noted a gleam in DeLauro’s eye as she talked about her critical role in securing funding for the greenway. As one participant noted to me at dinner Saturday night, “She really gets it.”

A local institution that really gets it is Yale, which sent New Haven relations Vice President Mike Morand and engineer David Spalding to accept an award for its recent, stunningly well executed incorporation of the greenway along its new building at the corner of Prospect and Trumbull -— quite a turnaround for a place that a decade ago said that it would be impossible to accommodate the greenway through campus.

Evidence of support from the state level was evident too, with State Sen. Toni Harp and others greeting the audience. And the location of many of the events at City Hall reflects a local government that, though 15 years ago skeptical of the trail’s feasibility, now considers it an important priority.

Why It Matters

For those people who have never been on a lengthy completed stretch of greenway, such as the Farmington Canal in Hamden and Cheshire, the new greenway along the Hudson River in New York City, the Pinellas in St. Petersburg, Florida, or the Burke-Gilman and Seattle, a bike path might not seem like a revolutionary notion with the power to reshape cities. But go ask the thousands of happy people using these trails on your average weekend afternoon, and you’ll get a different reaction.

“The trail is the most popular thing in Hamden,” Lee Davies, Director of Traffic and Parking for Hamden, said at a recent South Central Regional Council of Governments meeting. Indeed, anyone running for office in Hamden nowadays knows that supporting the trail however possible is a basic requirement for election.

Greenways tap into the American desire for maintaining a connection to wilderness in an ever-developing landscape. Since Jefferson, Americans have wanted to keep a connection to the land even as our economy has driven most people away from direct everyday interaction with nature. In the 1860s, Frederick Law Olmstead created Central Park to give New Yorkers a retreat from the city; in the 1920s and 1930s, Benton MacKaye and others created the Appalachian Trail to allow urbanites to take a weekend and enjoy wilderness; and in the 1950s and 1960s, William Levitt and many other builders enabled tens of millions of Americans to flee the city for the suburbs partly to have their own little piece of backyard in which they could plant trees and have their kids play on the grass.

The vision of the East Coast Greenway Alliance, and its local allies such as the Farmington Canal Rails-to-Trails Association (for which I currently serve as Vice-President), meshes peculiarly well with the current trajectory of American cities. It is an interesting twist of history that much of the East Coast Greenway, and all of the Farmington Canal Greenway, lie along former rail beds. The railroads made or broke cities in the nineteenth century. As former Yale professor William Cronon detailed in his book Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago beat out St. Louis as the great metropolis of the Midwest through its ability to consolidate rail transportation. New Haven likewise thrived based on easy rail access to New England, New York, and beyond.

The importance of connecting trails together is harder to understand, because it doesn’t depend on the ability to move physical goods. Rather, it comes from the need in the American mind for a connection to nature, and the failure of the previous generations’ attempts to fill that need. Central Park and its peers like Forest Park in St. Louis, though still grand, feel confining in an age in which cars have made much vaster spaces accessible; you never really escape from the city even wandering among the supposedly wild paths of The Ramble. The Appalachian Trail, though still an astonishing accomplishment, is too far away from major metropolitan areas for most Americans to incorporate it regularly into family lives that are as busy as ever. And the suburbs failed as victims of their own success—it is impossible to buy a suburban home in most parts of the country without thinking that the beautiful vista in the backyard will in ten years be another row of McMansions just like yours.

Hence the appeal of greenways—they are easily accessible, permanently preserved, and, if the vision of the East Coast Greenway Alliance is realized, practically endless. Few people will ever emulate Wil Hylton, one of the main speakers of the conference this weekend, who biked the entire 2,600-mile greenway with his wife Jenny last summer. But many people here will tell their kids “if you kept going up this trail, past Hamden, past Cheshire, one day you’ll get to Maine.” And it won’t be only the kids doing the dreaming about their homes in Dixwell, or Newhallville, or Spring Glen, being connected to millions of other homes along the greenway in many other states.

Previously marginal amenities like greenways are more important than you might think in an era in which, as Yale professor Doug Rae points out, much of the physical “centralizing forces” that forced people to live in particular places has been replaced by “decentralizing” technology that allows work to be done from almost anywhere.

If New Haven is going to make it, there have to be compelling reasons to live here. Being a hub in this generation’s most ambitious green space and recreation project is one.

To learn more:

• East Coast Greenway Alliance
• Farmington Canal Rails-to-Trails Assocation
• Diary of Wil Hylton’s trip on the East Coast Greenway

Adam Gordon is editor of chief of The Next American City, a quarterly magazine about the future of cities and suburbs.