Culture & Community | Downtown | Environment | Public art | Arts & Culture
Top: East Rock/Downtown Alder Eli Sabin, who started riding the canal as a kid. Bottom: Friends Barbara Amodio and Beverly Duncan, who have ridden the entire East Coast Greenway from Maine to Florida over a series of years. "It's very exciting," Amodio said.
When he was a kid growing up in New Haven, Alder Eli Sabin used to eye a heavy gate that cut off the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail just beyond Temple Street. When Sabin asked his dad about it, he explained that it was where the trail ended, and an overgrown no-man’s land that housed the remnants of a nineteenth-century railroad began.
Now, Sabin has a different answer for the curious kids who venture towards the gate: it’s the continuation of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail. And now, it's open to all who wish to journey through it.
Sabin brought that story to Grove Street last Friday, as city officials, engineers, seasoned cyclists and transit enthusiasts unveiled a long-awaited, 1.6-mile section of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail that has taken 16 years, $12 million, and three city administrations to get over the finish line. As rain fell in heavy sheets outside, dozens gathered beneath an old railway tunnel, where bright lighting, a pedestrian-friendly ramp, smooth concrete and glowing information and history panels have completely transformed the space.
It is the last leg in a 4.59-mile stretch of trail that runs through New Haven, on an 84-mile path from New Haven to Northampton, Mass. That trail is still non-contiguous: exposed sections remain in Southington and Plainville. It repurposes the route that first held the Farmington Canal, and later the New Haven and Northampton Railroad Co., in the first half of the nineteenth century.
City Plan Director Laura Brown: An investment that will pay off for many decades and generations to come.
"This is a moment that will be remembered not only in the history of our city but in the history of our state," said City Plan Director Laura Brown, pointing to the deep history of the trail and the long-term mental, physical, emotional and economic benefits of a city with thriving outdoor greenspaces. "It is the kind of investment that will pay off" for decades to come.
“It is really inspiring” to see such collaboration “when you have the national government pulling the rug out from under us,” added Mayor Justin Elicker, himself an avid cyclist. He recognized the sheer amount of work that advocates have put into it, praising civic cheerleaders like Aaron Goode, Doug Hausladen, former East Rock Alder Dick Lyons, environmentalist Nancy Alderman and representatives of the East Coast Greenway for their tenacity.
The trail now runs beneath the upper edges of downtown and out to Long Wharf Drive, with some sections below ground and others at street level. Just east of Temple Street, it travels below Whitney Avenue and behind Audubon Street, where Frances "Bitsie" Clark dreamed up the Audubon Arts District in the 1980s. There, it remains below street level through Grove Street (if a person takes the path, they can see why architect Dean Sakamoto used to call it New Haven’s “low line”).
Top: Mayor Justin Elicker, who was an intern with the city in 2009 (a common theme of the day was current and former city employees, joked Hausladen during his remarks). Bottom: Durham, N.C. resident Dennis Markatos-Soriano, who is the executive director of the East Coast Greenway Alliance.
Towards the end of that stretch, a railway tunnel is now cyclist- and pedestrian friendly, with lighting, a ramp and panels that teach passers-by about the history and role of the canal. That area is open 24 hours a day, with blue lights and video surveillance meant to increase public safety, Brown said. Then at Grove Street, the trail comes up to street level, and follows a path onto Olive Street, Water Street, then Brewery Street.
It ends at Long Wharf Drive, where engineer William Lanson expanded the city’s Long Wharf in the nineteenth century, a move that allowed New Haven to become a trade partner with bigger port cities like New York. Lanson also laid part of the foundation of the original Farmington Canal, making the finished trail a full circle moment centuries in the making.
Friday, advocates cheered on not just the completion of the trail, but the decades of work that have gone into it. When work on Phase IV began in 2009, John DeStefano was still the mayor of New Haven. Karen Gilvarg was the director of the city plan department. A first round of engineers and architects, including Milone & MacBroom, Dean Sakamoto Architects, and Johnson Land Design, presented their visions for the trail with the sense that it could be done in a couple of years.
Monica Perez del Rio, who at the time worked with Sakamoto, remembered the hours of work that Sakamoto poured into the design, including extensive research at the New Haven Museum that is now integrated into the tunnel. “We did tons of sketches of our vision,” she remembered, from details like pedestrian safety to names of cities that the trail passes through.
Farmington Canal Rail-to-Trail Association Board Member Aaron Goode and architect Monica Perez del Rio, who worked closely with architect Dean Sakamoto on early designs for the project in 2009.
At the time, Sakamoto—whose interpretive design is integrated into the final work, from delicate chrome-colored elm leaves to the outline of a boat on the concrete beyond the tunnel—suggested that it would be done by 2014. But 2014, as Mayor Toni Harp made history, came and went. Then there was 2015. And 2016. Nine property owners dragged their feet on easements that the city needed to work on Phase IV. Somewhere in there, Sakamoto moved to Honolulu to lead the then-new Shade Institute and continue his work in adaptive reuse.
Then in 2018—by then, Mike Piscitelli was leading the City Plan Department—the city announced that it was close to finalizing agreements and putting the project out to bid. It took another three years to formally break ground, and another four to finish.
Along the way, the city secured a total of $12 million, including $7 million in federal funding (Rep. Rosa Delauro said it was closer to $9.25 million, a figure that the city has yet to confirm), and $4.3 million in state funds. CJ Fucci Inc. and the engineering firm SLR Consulting, which has an in-house team of architects, got it over the finish line.
“It’s a BFD [big fucking deal] for me,” said Goode, who has been a steadfast champion of the project for decades. When he wrote his first grant for the project, he remembered, “Donald Trump was still a reality t.v. star and TikTok was a sound that a clock makes.”
He couldn’t have anticipated then just how vital—and at times, how much of a thorn in his side—the trail project would become. During the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, “we saw how much the trail matters,” as fresh air and outdoor spaces in urban centers like New Haven became a lifeline. Invoking a range of historical figures, from Maimonides to Oliver Wolcott to William Lanson, he added that the advocacy, while not for the faint of heart, was well worth it.
“The Farmington Canal has been making history for 200 years,” he said. This, finally, is its continuation.