Ribbon Cut On Renovated West Rock Nature Center

Honda Smith still thinks fondly upon her time as a kid going to summer camp in West Rock Park, training on the park’s ropes course as a newly hired city parks department employee, and then riding through the park’s trails atop a horse — an Appaloosa named McIntosh — during her decade as a city parks police officer. 

On Monday morning, the West Rock/West Hills alder returned to the park to help cut the ribbon on a recently renovated West Rock Nature Center — so that a next generation of westside kids can explores the park’s woodsy environs just like she did.

Smith, Mayor Justin Elicker, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, city Parks Director Max Webster, and other representatives from the Parks Department and the youth-environmental-education nonprofits Common Ground and Solar Youth cut that ribbon at the West Rock Nature Center at 1080 Wintergreen Ave. 

The nature center’s visitor center and ​“nature house” sit amidst West Rock Park’s 43 acres of woods, fields, and trails. The buildings’ property is owned by the City of New Haven, even though it’s located just over the town line in Hamden. It abuts the Merritt Parkway, separated from the sights and sounds of vehicle traffic by a few dozen feet and many more trees. 

Monday’s ribbon cutting comes nearly a year after the city finished renovating and reviving the West Rock Nature Center’s main visitor center last July. Elicker and Zinn said that the city spent $250,000 on a complete interior renovation — including rebuilding the electrical service; improving the ventilation, heating, and cooling; redoing the floors, painting the interior, removing existing objects, and other work. 

Elicker described these renovation as part of the city’s broader, years-long effort to renovate and bring back to life city-owned buildings in public parks — like the Barnard nature center, Coogan Pavilion in Edgewood Park, and the Salperto Community Center in East Shore Park.

The West Rock building has been in use since last July by Common Ground and Solar Youth for a range of environmental-themed programming, including improving the park’s trails, removing litter and invasive species, building outdoor classrooms and foot bridges, and other work. City Outdoor Adventure Coordinator Jackie Gaudioso said the nature center will also host a summer camp in July. ​“The world is our oyster moving forward with this place,” she said, as she encouraged local nonprofits to reach out to the parks department to reserve the space for programming of their own.

Monday also marked opening day for the ​“nature house,” a separate building behind the visitor center that includes a wall with terrariums containing six live snakes; a children’s library with natured-based books; and what Gaudioso described as a ​“sensory art space.”

“It was a fixer upper, to say the least,” Elicker said about the West Rock Nature Center pre-renovation. The 1946-constructed building ​“just looks so different” now that the city’s engineering department has rehabbed it and helped it come back online to be used by Common Ground, Solar Youth, and the parks department.

City spokesperson Lenny Speiller said that the visitor center was last used by the parks department for an Eco Adventure Camp in 2019. The nature house was last open in 2020.

“Dreams really do come true,” Alder Smith said about the revived nature center. ​“Being a kid in an urban community,” she and her classmates couldn’t afford to, say, go to the Bronx Zoo. But they could walk down the windy streets of the West Rock Park neighborhood to get to a part that has a wealth of natural life, trees and plants and bears and deer and bobcats and more.

Solar Youth Executive Director Candace Wright said that she and teens who work with her West Rock-based nonprofit hike over to the nature center all the time. ​“It’s in our back door,” she said. ​“Kids getting their feet in the ground really does provide autonomy, confidence, and resilience.”