New Haven Independent

Posted by: cedarhillresident | February 21, 2008 8:40 AM

HELLO!!!!!!!!

"East Rock has no participation," No active friends groups!!!!!! Not true! We in Cedar Hill are involved and HAVE BEEN TRYING to get friends of East Rock going again. Ask the Parks department, ask URI, Ask greenspace!!! We just keep hitting stone walls. But we still go out and do what we have to!! And now that we finally made some head way .... hmmmm I hope all that we have been talking to are reading this.
We in Cedar Hill started on our side and have been trying to get the funds to organize a larger group...you guys know what funds "Friends of East Rock Funds". We may be a small group but we do pick up trash and plant flowers. We have larger ideas. And have been talking to the parks department for over a year. We were told about the funds and have been perusing them for the past few months, before the good weather kicks in. And now someone is saying there is no ACTIVE group. Yes there is. Sorry I am so in love with our park!! It is the heart of our community. We may be a rag tag group but we have been active for over 5 years now! and in the past two year have been moving our work into the park area. So please relize that to ignore the one active group, the one that does not mind getting dirty and picking up garbage should and the one that will be around in another 5 years is not the right way to go!

Posted by: PowertothePeople | February 21, 2008 10:07 AM

I hear you Cedar and you aren't the only one. Chatham Square Park has had a group for 12 years but they have almost given up because the parks department has been so unresponsive. The group cleans, prunes and plants but for 12 years was never able to get the water in the park turned on until August. By then everything they planted is dead. For years they carried buckets of water from their homes to try to keep the park looking nice but everyone knows that gets old after awhile.

Last summer it took direct pressure from City Hall to get something done. When asked, Bob Levine told tax paying, voting citizens "you are NOT a priority." The neighbors were willing to do all of the work. They just needed a plumber to come turn on the water. Bob says they only have 1 plumber and he had to get the ballfields ready first. It's the same thing every year. I would think that after 12 years of the problem a good manager would have found a solution. Levine tried to blame the union for not letting him hire someone part-time. So I called the union. They were never asked and would gladly have sent one of the hundreds of out of work union plumbers to do it. Finally LCI sent one of their plumbers to turn on the water. Now I'm betting we'll have to go through the same rigmarole this summer.

I believe that the problem with the parks dept is that they have a bureaucrat running it. He forgets that the parks are for the people. I've had parks employees tell me the same thing (the real people on the street doing the work not the ones in the office.) Get someone in there who cares about the communities and not just the budget and we might get more neighbors involved. Get someone who can find creative ways to solve problems and we might get more neighbors involved. Get someone who knows what Customer Service means and we might... well... you get where I'm heading.

Posted by: Ned | February 21, 2008 10:09 AM

Thank you Cedarhill.
I love the park.
My partner personally cleaned East Rock Park Dr., between East Rock Rd. and Whitney Ave., multiple times last summer. The city could close this section of road to traffic and the illegal dumping problem would be solved (for this part of the park anyway...) I make my morning round, through College Woods, with the dog in tow, picking up broken glass and trash. Can I take this opportunity to remind people to please clean up after your dog!
So much for complacency...
Transitory grad students and absentee landlords don't make for much of an active parks constituency.
Will the Parks Department please return the doors, to the war memorial at the summit of East Rock? I'm concerned that the doors have been stolen or melted down, or sold for scrap? Anyone have a clue what happened to them?

Posted by: cedarhillresident | February 21, 2008 2:56 PM

ned
As far as the monument read this story. I know they have the money coming in to fix it.
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2007/11/climb_to_angels.php

As far a the dog doo I am soooo with you on that. IT IS THE LAW pick up your POO! I am glad to see you are working on your end. I wonder if there are other small clusters of people doing work on the park at random times. And if there is a way to pull them all together. Shock that Bob did not bring us up at this meeting because we did talk to him about it when we meet about our play ground. Which yes we are getting fixed. YEAH! Thank to our MAYOR! THANK YOU JOHNNY!

PowertothePeople
I love your group! You guys are an inspiring group! And are talked about as a very positive!! I was at a meeting when you guys talked about your water plight. If you need to do a phone tree type thing (you know a large group of people all calling at once) to get your water on. We in Cedar Hill will definitely help! Chris has our contacts. I am Rebecca (just in case you did not know)

Posted by: cedarhillresident | February 21, 2008 4:35 PM

straight from the presses....ned the doors are still there. They had to cover them because people were trying to break into the tower. I was also told that someone lovely....cut the funding that was mentioned in that article. So they are on the hurt for more funding to do that.

Posted by: Rob Smuts | February 21, 2008 4:52 PM

Bob Levine (and the leadership team he has at Parks & Rec) is a tremendous asset to this City.

The simple reality is that because of budget constraints, the Parks department now has 67 employees - down from 106 employees seven years ago. Even in the rough days of the early nineties, when grass when unmowed and rec programs were scarce, Parks had many more employees than it does now. The leadership of this department, working with a great staff, manages to find a way to maintain the quality of our parks and the ever-growing demand for our recreational programs (and growing quality - as the article mentions) with tremendous efficiency. We can't do everything we'd like and some things take a little longer than we'd like, but Parks & Rec puts together a great product.

I understand the frustration of "Powertothepeople," but you got it wrong. Like a good manager, Bob wouldn't make promises he didn't know he could deliver on and tried to be completely transparent about the factors he had to work with when the neighborhood came to him about Chatham Square. He didn't give instant gratification by promising he'd fix the problem because he didn't know whether he could, but he heard the neighborhood's needs and went to work. The "political pressure" mentioned was the alderwoman calling me - but by the time I called Bob, he had already worked out a solution, which is exactly the best kind of manager to have.

- Rob Smuts, Chief Administrative Officer

Posted by: Chris Gray | February 22, 2008 4:25 AM

O.K., it's about quarter to three in the morning and I should be heading to sleep. (I've reverted to my schedule from the '70s, when I waited up to find out if someone showed up to do the graveyard shift at WYBC or if I had to fill in.)

But, we've hit upon the topic that has endeared me to New Haven since my dad took me on walks to the Green on his lunch hours from Miller's Department Store, in the building he oversaw the construction of where, later, Fugazi Travel and, now the Great Wall of China grocery is located.

He also used to put me up on the old Yale Wall on College Street so I could walk eye to eye with him and envision the adult I would become.

Later, I wrote the first poem of my adult life, "New Haven, 1972", in response to a plan put forward by Yale, which I assumed would succeed, to turn Edgewood Park into a rowing course. It ended, "The elms are dying and Edgewood Park will soon be gone."

A couple of years later, I brought my girlfriend's son to play at the playground in that park and encountered the Exit Theater performing in John Baringer's "Arts of the Park" program and, within two weeks, I had written my first performed short play and acted in it and another at Lighthouse Park. Two weeks later my second performed play was presented near the Hockey Rink, again in Edgewood. (Ms. Kelman, I still have many copies of John's beautiful posters for that program for your project.)

John also brought Frederick Law Olmstead to my attention. Olmstead, I have since learned, designed Edgewood Park, but also Central Park, Prospect Park (in Brooklyn, where my father, on bended knee proposed to my mother), the Boston Public Gardens (literally across the street from the Emerson College Student Union, where Geoff Fox and Jay Leno learned to ignore me), the Fenway and that entire park system around Boston, and, of course, the grounds of the Columbian Exposition of 1892 in Chicago. I recommend reading his philosophy about the place of parks in modern urban life.

Eventually, I had my most successful campaign media event in my political career, the burning of a flag (a Yale flag, much to the chagrin of the WVIT reporter who had convinced the station to invest in a live line to the first Bush White House for his response to my assumed career suicide) in West River Park. I was pointing out the park's conversion into an auxiliary parking lot for Yale football during the season, another perk we citizens give the tax-exempt behemoth.

While I can not say that I have done nearly as much as some of the above posters, one little effort I made for years was to pick up many of the empty, tiny little plastic "nickel" bags I found in parks all over the city.

Paul might recall my noticing one under my feet in a ball field off Ella Grasso Blvd. in the middle of an odd interview/debate with a Dileto representative, Robie Pooley and I (filling in for Matt Borenstein) during a later part of that campaign season. I used it to point to out lack of maintenance and supervision at the park where, if I recall correctly, the body of the "drop a dime" murder victim, Barbara Komisky had turned up.

I have often said that my oldest friends are the trees on the Green.

For a kid born in a part of Long Island that was originally part of New Haven Colony (I miss the museum's old name), our parks are where I think of when I use the word home. Thanks to all of you who care so passionately about them that you speak and act in behalf of them.

Shame on the department of Parks, Recreation and Trees for forgetting that little boy at Westbury the other day! Kind of calls into question Mr. Smutts' ringing endorsement, doesn't it?

Posted by: Chris Gray | February 22, 2008 4:38 AM

Hey, the ground is almost all white, already!

Posted by: Chris Gray | February 22, 2008 4:40 AM

Crap, the Turks have invaded Iraq!

Posted by: cedarhillresident | February 22, 2008 11:51 AM

Rob is right the parks department is way under staffed, but there is always that chance to do volentare work with them. And new haven has many urban gardeners that work in projects like greenspace that can take some time to help that department with some of the smaller things. take one day out of the month with the family and spend an hour or 2 to just walk the park area and pick up. Such a simple thing and a great chance to teach your kids community values.

They have a program called adopt a tree
http://www.cityofnewhaven.com/Parks/treesNH/
or do simple things like our area does... we organize street clean ups in the spring, we go up all the streets in our area and prune the trees so they stay healthy. We wead wake smaller areas of the park and plant flowers.

Just call the parks department and ask what you can I do to help. You maybe be suprised how wonderful you can feel when you drive by an area and say we did that!

Chris I do have to defend Bob in the fact that what Rob said is true...he does take the time out even in his busy day to address community concerns. My only problem is that we did sit there with him and ask about the "Friends of East Rock" and we wanted to start it up again. We had asked if he knew anything about it and if someone had it going in a different part of East Rock. Which he did say he would look into and did ask us to call him back on it. Now I was not at this meeting so I don't know if he mentioned the fact that we were trying to get it up and going again. Durning the Alderman election Roland had organized a clean up, and we where hoping that may have gotten people wanting to start it up again. But we heard nothing after that.

Posted by: Chris Gray | February 23, 2008 12:02 AM

CedarHill,

I don't have any axe to grind about Bob or Rob.

The story of a child left behind, however, was rather compelling and hard to ignore in light of plans to use the department resources for a day camp program.

Back in the '90s, my friend and colleague in both the Green Party and the Coalition for People, Dave Weber, ran a couple of summer outings for kids from public housing for the Coalition and he would have committed Hari Kari (o.k., that's an exaggeration) if he left a child behind.

Also, I remembered another park story while telling my Mom about the above post.

Dileto used to sponsor a "Seniors' Day" in Wooster Square Park every spring and my dear little old lady colleague at the Elder Newspaper, Rita Reutter, managed to manipulate him into having his staff photographer snap a shot of we three together, me behind the sign Steve Yura had made for the paper, with him holding a copy and trying to smile down upon her.

I, later, only used the portion with me and the sign in campaign literature, which I thought was a hoot, but, now, I realize it would have been a whole lot funnier if I'd printed the entire shot.