Border Road Opens. Shrug

Heading back home from a family viewing in North Haven of Ride Along 2, Lajuan Anderson cruised into her West Rock neighborhood via a newly opened road rather than travel miles out of her way.

She didn’t have to contend with traffic lights and traffic, or wind her way through out-of-the-way streets. Anymore.

That’s because a long-blocked border between Hamden and New Haven’s West Rock neighborhood has now fully opened.

The border separated a suburban neighborhood from a collection of public-housing developments. For decades, a controversial fence separated the two sides, forcing public-housing tenants to drive far out of their way just to get to a job or a store or a relative’s home. That fence came down amid fanfare back in May 2014.

So people could walk or bike across the border. But only in the past three weeks has road work been completed so that New Haven’s Wilmot Road meets Hamden’s Woodin Street.

This time, the milestone attracted little to no notice. Except along Wilmot to the Brookside and Westville Manor and Rockview and Ribicoff public-housing developments, where the Anderson family now has an easier ride.

“We love it,” Lajuan Anderson, who bought one of the new homes included in the mixed-income Brookside reconstruction, said Sunday after she turned her Toyota Highlander onto Wilmont en route home from the movie with husband Eric and daughter Khalia.

She and Eric are glad not to have to contend with congested roads surrounding Southern Connecticut State University to wind their way back to their neighborhood.

“We do everything in Hamden,” she said. ​“Shopping. My parents live in Hamden.”

“We would still be in Southern right now” and not home ​“for at least 15 minutes,” if not for the Wilmot Road opening, Eric added.

Terrance Murphy (pictured) was headed in the opposite direction in his 2003 Ford Expedition, to Home Depot, after dropping off a friend in Westville Manor. Murphy lives in Hamden; he works building maintenance in the Westville Manor development. He said he and coworkers also from Hamden are pleased they no longer have to ​“go all the way around Hamden” to get to work.

“The traffic with the students — it was crazy! Here it’s a straight shot, one or two shots,” said Al Thomas, a truck driver by trade who steered his Camry home on Wilmot Sunday after getting gas at a Hamden Hess.

The housing authority considered having a Christmas-week public event to mark the opening of the road, the way it did when the fence came down. Then officials realized there was no need, said authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton.

“The road’s open. It’s a community,” DuBois-Walton said. ​“It’s a community. It’s been very quiet.

Before the fence came down a year and a half ago, Hamden neighbors and officials packed public meetings to complain. They warned of increased crime and traffic jams.

Since then, the city hasn’t heard a word of complaint from Hamden, DuBois-Walton said. ​“We always thought it was not going to be the end of the world. It was just going to increase access. Whatever people’s fears were have not been realized,” DuBois-Walton said .“It’s a community that works,” she said of the three rebuilt housing developments on the New Haven side. ​“Like Monterey [Homes, the form Elm Haven] became. Like Quinnipiac Terrace became after it was rebuilt.”

Hamden Police Chief Tom Wydra said he knows of no criminal incidents or traffic complaints tied to the opening of WIlmot Road — or even, offhand, to last year’s removal of the fence.

He said the department has ​“ramped up bicycle patrols” in the Woodin Street area. That has helped ​“calm people’s fears,” he said.

“I’ve not got any complaints, not one,” concurs a Hamden council member who represents homeowners on the other side of the border, Berita Rose-Lewis. ​“There’s been a lot of communication with folks. Things have worked themselves out.”

One irony of the opening of the road after decades of contention over the fence — which Hamdenites said they sought to keep to keep out crime and to protect property values — is the fact that the more impressive homes now stand on the New Haven side of the line. That’s because of the housing authority’s rebuilding of developments like Brookside and Rockview. A vacant lot on the New Haven side of the Woodin-Wilmot intersection is the planned future site of more homeowner-occupied Rockview homes.

The road opening elicited a shrug from the Hamden homeowner who lives in the first house past the intersection.

“Ain’t no difference to me,” remarked the homeowner, John Jones of Elliott Drive, who said he has lived in his house since 1981. ​“Ain’t no traffic coming through. They can do whatever they want over there, as as long as they don’t come here messing with me.”