The ​“Healing” Begins

With Occupy New Haven gone, the city is left with a ​“concrete” dust bowl and a tree that will likely have to come down. The grass could return by summer.

That was the initial assessment of deputy city parks director Christy Hass as she surveyed a newly denuded upper Green Wednesday afternoon. She supervised workers setting up fencing around an area held by Occupy New Haven until police removed the 6‑month-old protest encampment Wednesday morning.

While no tents remain, the camp has left a scar of dusty, dense dirt. The occupation killed all the grass that once carpeted the area.

Hass said it will take about $25,000 to bring the section of the Green back to life.

At least one venerable resident of the Green may not make it. A maple near where the camp stood is looking not long for this world, Hass said.

Parks workers will have to get up in the canopy and inspect it more closely to know for sure, but the 50- to 60-year-old tree will likely have to be removed, Hass said. ​“It’s in decline. We might have to take it down.”

It’s unclear if the tree’s demise is a direct effect of the occupation, Hass said. The tree (center-left in photo) was already struggling. The camp didn’t help, Hass said.

While its neighbors have started sending out new buds, the maple still stands bare, shriveled-looking.

The presence of tents and occupiers has compressed the soil all around the area, which has made life difficult for the trees, Hass said. Addressing that problem is just one of a list of tasks the parks department will take on over the next couple of months to make the Green green again.

Job one: putting up fencing to protect the area while it heals.

On Wednesday afternoon, Hass oversaw the deployment of black metal fences and wooden and plastic snow fencing. The metal fencing consists of recycled railings from the old New Haven Coliseum, snatched up by Hass before the building was blown up in January 2007.

“We did a lot of liberating from the old Coliseum,” Hass said with a laugh. ​“My welder made these.”

The black railings stretched less than halfway around the site. Parks workers Wilfred Chaisson and Edwin Rodriguez (pictured) started putting up wooden snow fencing to complete the rest.

Parks and public-works staff removed all the major debris from the Green with heavy equipment earlier Wednesday. They then raked the area. Hass said a golf-cart-sized vacuum would go over the area to pick up the final remains of the Occupation, which included scattered white pellets from a beanbag chair squished in the jaws of a payloader.

To help the trees, parks workers will soon commence ​“air-spading,” using a special tool to blast the soil with highly pressurized air, which will ease the compression and help tree roots to breathe, Hass said.

The city plans to work with the state agricultural research station to test the soil all around the site. Hass said she wants to make sure there’s no soil contamination from where the occupiers ran generators. ​“That, to me, is a nerve-wracking thing.”

Workers will then have to prep the area for seeding. Putting grass seed down now would be like ​“throwing marbles on the floor,” Hass said. The land may have to be tilled or ​“injected” with water and air, she said. That will help break up the ​“concrete” that the soil has been compressed into.

In areas where it’s not ​“concrete” the bare ground is covered with a powdery dust, the kind that made people pack up and move from Oklahoma to California generations ago.

The city will have to plant some grass that will do well in the shade, for once the leaves really come in on the trees, Hass said. Another challenge will be water. The area will need irrigation. She said she’ hopes to pull from a nearby fire hydrant. She said parks will use a big sprinkler to water all the grass in.

The area won’t be ​“lush” with grass until the summer, Hass said. ​“I’d like to give it two months of being roped off.”

“Now,” she said, ​“we can begin to heal.”

Click here to read about the removal of the last occupiers Wednesday morning. Click the play arrow to watch highlights.