Volunteers Take Out The Trash At Beaver Brook

On Tuesday morning, Peter Davis, a volunteer river keeper with the city parks department, and fellow volunteer David Burgess were over the edge of the slope off Diamond Street in Beaver Hills, lugging a dilapidated couch out of the woods. Around them was a thin carpet of other discarded objects. Among the trash bags were a fan, a decaying rug, a mattress, a rusting wheelchair.

It was a lot of garbage. Davis and Burgess were taking it one piece at a time.

“I thought this was going to be too heavy to move, but it’s not,” Davis said.

The work of Davis and his crew of five volunteers on Tuesday morning on the slope off of Diamond Street is part of a larger effort to restore the space around Beaver Brook, a tributary of the West River that currently passes through a city-owned wooded area between Crescent Street, Fitch Street, and Diamond Street. A project of the West River Watershed Coalition (WRWC), Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), Friends of Beaver Ponds Park, and the WEB (Whalley, Edgewood, Beaver Hills) Management Team, the effort seeks to open up the brook to pedestrian access through three tasks: devining the tree canopy and removing invasive species, establishing a trail — and removing trash. 

One of Davis’s volunteers on Tuesday morning was Nan Bartow, a co-leader of Friends of Beaver Ponds Park, a group she helped found in 2004. ​“I used to live in those apartments,” Bartow said, pointing down Diamond Street, ​“so I’m humiliated as to what it has become.”

“It’s a mess,” agreed Davis, who is overseeing the trash pickup effort. He and his crew spent Tuesday morning hauling trash off the hillside below Diamond Street up onto the curb, from where a frontloader from the Parks Department later took it to New Haven’s transfer station on Middletown Avenue. So far, in addition to bags of trash (e.g., a bag of used diapers), the crew has dealt with sofas, tires, wood, and construction debris — ​“anything they don’t want to pay to take to the dump,” Bartow said.

Davis remained chipper; he could already see what the results would be. ​“This is going to be a great area once it’s cleaned up,” he said.

Beaver Ponds and Beaver Brook have changed — a lot — over the centuries, Bartow pointed out. The area began as a marsh that beavers transformed into ponds. Trappers killed the beavers for their pelts. For a couple hundred years the area was surrounded by farms. Its peat was sold as fertilizer; a slaughterhouse nearby dumped its waste into the water.

Early in the 20th century, as the urban development reached the shores, the city transformed the area into a park. The brook at Fitch and Crescent was turned into a swimming spot with a lifeguard. Probably, Bartow said, ​“the water was not very clean.” But it attracted crowds into the 1930s, until several drownings and a scandal involving nude bathing put an end to it. Over time, the city parceled out park land to build Southern Connecticut, Hillhouse High School, Jackie Robinson Middle School, among other municipal projects.

The area encompassing Beaver Brook is open space, and city property. There is a logic to its having become a place where people dump their trash; the overgrowth and trees make the hill difficult to see from Fitch and Crescent, and on Diamond Street, the drop is steep enough from the road that the trash is invisible unless you happen to walk up to the edge. Over the past 35 years, Davis has cleaned the embankment 5 or 6 times already.

Bartow has a simple possible solution to prevent people from dumping their trash off of Diamond Street after Davis and his crew are finished cleaning up: Put up a fence.

She noted that, in the past, at the entrance to Beaver Ponds at Fournier Street, ​“people would come in there and dump trash and construction debris.” Friends of Beaver Ponds Park worked with the city’s parks department to install a gate. ​“Now there’s much less dumping.” A fence running along Diamond Street would do the same, preventing people from just backing up, say, a pickup truck, emptying its bed’s contents into the brook’s ravine, and driving off.

Bartow acknowledged that the fence wouldn’t necessarily prevent people from dumping their trash somewhere else in New Haven. ​“They’ll go to some other place that’s easier” to dump, she said wryly. Davis, who cleans up trash all over New Haven, has found illegal dumping ​“everywhere,” from Fair Haven and East Rock to West River and Long Wharf. But the deterrent of a fence on Diamond Street would help keep Beaver Brook cleaner for when it’s more open to the public.

Southern Connecticut’s interest in improving the area around Beaver Brook has ​“given us all heart,” Bartow said. ​“And they’re very close so they can watch it.” And she credited Davis and his crew with keeping up with the trash accumulation over the years, noting that it’s an all-volunteer effort. ​“How much does the city value the work that they do?” she asked. ​“When they can no longer do it, who will? How do you replace a team like that?”

“I intend to come back tomorrow,” Davis said. There is also a crew cleanup scheduled for this and subsequent Fridays. For Davis, both the immediate need and the immediate benefits are clear.

“I have talked to the neighbors,” he said, who were ​“very curious as to what’s going on. They’re very happy — ecstatic, even.”

“Wait until we clean this place up, and how nice it will look,” he added.

Volunteers interested in restoring Beaver Brook are invited to join a crew on Fridays, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Feb. 2 and Feb. 9. Meet at the corner of Fitch Street and Crescent Street. Volunteers are invited to come as they are, with sturdy shoes and gloves. WRWC will provide tools, including grabbers and trash bags, but you are welcome to bring your own. Please bring drinking water.