Heidi Herrick has a reverence for East Rock Park. 

I meet her in the green, sunlit classroom space in East Rock’s Trailbridge Environmental Center. She’s stern, sarcastic, and in love with her city — which she’s lived in since 1998. Clad in blue-rimmed glasses, a suit jacket, jeans, and hiking boots, she’s there for the Saturday volunteer group arranged by the nonprofit Friends of East Rock Park (“FERP,” as she calls it), where volunteers shoulder routine park maintenance tasks — from picking up litter to repairing trails to pulling invasive plants.  

For now, Herrick’s task is to man the classroom: refilling a steaming pot of coffee, cutting slices of sweet potato pie onto floppy paper plates, and swinging the door to the center open for passers-by. Outside, all is October and aflame, sugar maple trees dripping red, sun hot and orange, children chasing each other through piles of fallen leaves. 

Last spring, when the daffodils came to College Woods, I first began spending every weekday afternoon on East Rock. Wrapped up in asphalt and highways, the 425-acre tangle of elms and oaks became a refuge for me. Green spaces like East Rock are all across New Haven; a study conducted by the Trust for Public Land finds 96% of New Haven residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, and 12% of the city’s total area is parkland. For comparison, in the similarly sized Syracuse, only 76% of residents live 10 minutes away from a park, and only 4% of the city is parkland. 

And yet, New Haven Parks has half the funding of Syracuse’s parks, a third of similarly sized Springfield, Massachusetts’, and a quarter of Richmond, Virginia’s. 

For the needs of a city

“The fire department, you really can’t cut easily. Police, you can’t cut easily. So what do you have left to cut? Parks,” says Herrick. Since 1998, when she first moved to the city, the park’s budget has fallen by $1,294,61 — equating to a near 50% drop. 

“If you look at a map of New Haven, it’s got two huge highways. You go downtown, it’s full of courthouses, and churches, and cultural institutions. And then there’s Yale,” explains Herrick. “None of that is taxable. So New Haven, as a city, is poor.”

Herrick whisks me on a tour of East Rock’s ranger offices, down the hallway from the Trailbridge Environmental Center’s classroom. She points out photos from 2022’s East Rock Park photography contest, detailed hand-drawn posters of the park’s geology and trail system, and “about a million bird books,” stacked in a free library. 

The Friends of East Rock side of the Center, Herrick explains, was renovated just two years ago using a pocket of funds from the American Rescue Plan. The walls were painted green, the courtyard was cleaned of weeds, picnic tables were put up, and a garden was planted near the entrance. 

Herrick then leads me to a dimly lit room, crammed with piles of fishing rods and snow shoes, a taxidermied screech owl, and a shelf of bones and snake skins.

“[This] is the rangers’ half, don’t ask about it,” she says, gesturing to the shelved evidence of what was, two decades before, a blooming Parks Department.

Three years ago, the city made a controversial choice to combine the Public Works and Parks and Recreation departments. This left the department without a designated Parks director — and facilitated a further cut in funding. Organizations like Friends of East Rock Park and Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative (URI) have since emerged to fill the void of park maintenance and sustainability management.

When there are declining resources in city budgets, the public becomes more critical, says Colleen Murphy-Dunning, director of the URI. For nearly thirty years, the Yale-based initiative has not only employed New Haven residents and Yale students to construct community green spaces and plant trees, but it has also become increasingly essential to the survival of New Haven’s parks by providing funding, staff, organization, and expertise to nonprofit organizations like FERP.

Murphy-Dunning — who begins by saying she prefers thinking of work as “getting to do things” over “having to do things” — keeps things optimistic. City maintenance “still mows the lawns” no matter how many people are on staff, she clarifies. “But that means they can do less of the big things, like maintaining trails or cleaning trash.” 

The decentralization of park management also brings an unexpected benefit. Instead of park staff bureaucratically allocating funds and planning out park spaces, community members can now be part of the decision-making process. “They have agency and control and decision-making and feel empowered to make a difference,” says Murphy-Dunning. “And they do make a difference.”

For the love of a city

David Shimchick, the lead volunteer of Friends of East Rock, doesn’t like the outdoors. 

“I don’t like bugs. I don’t like hiking,” he tells me from behind a tangled red knot of serviceberry shrubs. “I swam as a kid, I guess that’s something.”

With a bucket of litter in one hand and a car tire in the other, he steps through the shrubs back onto East Rock Park’s English Dr. It’s hot now, and Shimchick and I clean sweat from our brows as we work our way up the road. 

“The weirdest thing I ever found while picking up trash here was half of a Ski-doo snowmobile,” Shimchick says. He’s responsible for weekly litter pickups along the park’s most traversed roads. So far, we’ve found an assortment of the typical culprits: an entire fence, a broken mirror, a pair of sweatpants, half a briefcase, and a complete Corona six-pack. 

“I never get tired of picking up people’s trash. I pick up the trash up and down my street almost every day,” he explains. “I like making things look nice, I like knowing other people will enjoy it, even if I don’t.”

A lifetime schoolteacher, Shimchick retired into his role as leader of Friends of East Rock Park. As we walk, drivers shout out thanks, and runners pause to ask why we are there, at 10:00 a.m., pulling tires from the leafy mats that cover the park floor. In response, Shimchick always chants, “FERP — Friends of East Rock!” He proudly points out several sparkling new benches framing College Woods, fresh mulch for the playground, a newly installed fence, and the tightly kept garden at the Center’s entrance.

That Saturday, volunteer Kimberly Gibson is fighting an equally endless battle against the surge of East Rock’s invasive plants. She’s the unofficial invasive plant wrangler for the park: armed with a blue Patagonia hiking pack and an 8-inch saw blade, the short-haired molecular scientist takes on the park’s most stubborn vines and shrubs. 

I meet Gibson a little further up the road, as she’s sawing the lowermost branches off a red-crowned invasive euonymus shrub. 

“Who needs a gym membership when you can just go into the woods and rip out invasive species?” she says.

According to Gibson, the greenery in some corners of East Rock is nearly 80% invasive  — a relic of the park’s use in providing timber and fuel for the city’s first factories. Japanese barberry, garlic mustard, mugwort, and patches of invasive monocultures join the quilt of park greenery. 

“When an ecosystem is destroyed, generally the first things to re-populate it are invasives,” she says, pointing to the thousands of glimmered red berries gathered at the tips of the euonymus shrub’s branches. In the shrub’s red shade, a young ash tree grows, its pointed leaves reaching up to the heavy October sun. With the shrub spreading its ceiling above it, the native tree wouldn’t last a year. 

“I often feel like it’s just a losing battle,” she says, running her fingers through the young ash’s translucent green leaves. 

Last year, the Urban Resources Initiative surveyed community perceptions of New Haven parks. “Nature breaks in a city environment,” writes an anonymous New Haven resident, responding to the question, “What do you love about New Haven’s parks?” 

Each spring, invasive plants and trees will blow their seeds onto the banks of the Mill River and eat away at East Rock’s remaining few natives. Every day, cans will be thrown from car windows, and tinfoil sandwich wrappers will be left in the shade of maple trees. Already, birdsong has left the park, as have the Connecticut cougars and old-growth trees. The city has sunk into the bounds of the park’s glowing red basalt and its green roof. It takes a firm line of defense — Shimchick pulling litter, Gibson cutting trees — to keep East Rock Park as is. 

It takes time and effort to maintain East Rock — resources that other parks in the city may not have. 

Not every park gets the same amount of attention in New Haven. Parks in poorer neighborhoods are much smaller and less well-maintained, Herrick says. We sit down at a table in the Trailbridge classroom, with Gibson, all of us sipping coffee from mugs with Donald Grant Mitchell’s face printed across. 

Our conversation rapidly spins into one about housing; neither Gibson nor Herrick owns a house in New Haven’s East Rock neighborhood. According to her, most places near East Rock Park are priced at more than one million dollars. 

Access to quality, large green spaces depends on class — which in turn provides one with the resources and voice required to maintain these spaces. As we picked up garbage, Shimchick alluded to demands made by East Rock residents during the pandemic to close East Rock’s Farnam Drive to car traffic. Shimchick, who has a general distaste for hiking, points out the closure means there’s less litter to clean — and fewer people who are now able to use the park. 

“It’s predictable,” Murphy-Dunning says, laying it out for me: Most of the maintenance of these parks tends to hinge on one or two people with enough time and care in their hands. While there will always be volunteers like these in wealthier neighborhoods, smaller, poorer parks become run down so much faster if the few volunteers who maintain them move away or pick up a new job. 

However, there is a small green pocket in the city where this isn’t true: Beaver Pond.

For the love of fixing broken things 

I meet Friends of Beaver Pond President Park Nan Bartow beneath a clump of young willows, at what used to be the city’s dumping ground. Ten years ago, Beaver Pond Park was a swamp of burn-up cars and chunks of asphalt, home to the city’s trash and most nefarious invasives. Pressed up against the Dixwell neighborhood, where incomes dip to half that of East Rock’s, the park was left behind. 

Understanding they did not have the staff or funding to maintain Beaver Pond Park, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department was in the midst of slowly converting the park to a football field for James Hillhouse High School when Bartow, Friends of Beaver Pond Park, and Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative stepped in. 

Over the past 10 years, volunteers have transformed the “throwaway” urban swamp into what Bartow calls an “Urban oasis.” Yellow warblers, robins, and song sparrows interrupt our conversation; bees flit between the densely grown patch of native wildflowers, and young sugar maples glow in the morning sun. Bartow shows me some of the park’s ongoing projects — a patch of dirt where a co-volunteer at Friends of Beaver Pond plans to design and build a playground and a line of native trees planted by past Urban Resource Initiative volunteers. 

Having spent her childhood in the woods in Massachusetts, Bartow didn’t think New Haven would have enough “open spaces” for her to stay. 

She’s now been in New Haven for nearly 60 years. I understand why.

“Having this area here and watching us return it to what it should be — it’s just been a wonderful experience knowing that we’re leaving it in much better shape than we found it, for the people who come here,” she says. 

Bartow, however, is direct about the challenges that New Haven Parks faces. While she agrees with Murphy-Dunning’s belief in the magic of neighborhood-fueled action, she also believes that a stronger central leadership in the Parks and Recreation department is necessary for equity and a truer unity between New Haven Parks and Recreation and city folk.

Some simpler conveniences come from a better Parks and Recreation Department. Bartow shows me piles of cut branches and weeds from a clean-up project two summers ago that still have not been picked up by the department. Shimchick, as we walk the green tunnel of East Rock, points out degraded trails, haphazard steps, and a fallen “No Parking” sign. 

Last year’s Yale’s Urban Resources Initiative survey on New Haven Parks showed that volunteers alone cannot shoulder everything the city’s green spaces require. Many respondents asked for improved “rule enforcement” in the parks — rangers to fine dumpers, crack down on drug use, and institute park hours. Others asked for adequate bathrooms, fixed roads, and new and improved play spaces. While Bartow continues to care for her field of goldenrods, she cannot fulfill most of these requests; only the Parks Department can improve large-scale facilities. 

Improvement, to Bartow, will come from untangling once again the recently-merged Public Works and Parks departments. 

“When Mayor Elicker combined the departments, the guy who ran public works was suddenly then in charge of parks,” Bartow says. “We didn’t have a leader that knew parks like we know parks.”

Bartow believes change is coming. Last spring, the Urban Resources Initiative, Friends of Beaver Pond, East Rock Park, and a smattering of other groups came together to work alongside the Mayor in rethinking park funding. The discussion succeeded in bringing about the un-merging of Parks and Public Works. The extent to which this decision benefits New Haven Parks will be unclear until the Mayor officially hires a new Parks director. 

This doesn’t mean that public volunteer groups like Friends of East Rock and Beaver Pond, or the Urban Resources Initiative, ought to disappear entirely. While having the secure backbone of city government is important, it remains essential to give groups like Friends of Beaver Pond the opportunity to decide what the land should look like and steward it, says Murphy-Dunning.

Before leaving Beaver Pond Park, Bartow insists on taking me to a small circle of stone benches, set beneath a cyprus and cedar tree. The benches, she notes, were built from granite brought across the city by a park volunteer and put together by Friends of Beaver Pond over the past year. Some lean haphazardly, one heavy slab of granite balanced on two rocks, wedged with woods and slivers of limestone. Others sit firm, seemingly grown from the ground itself. 

“This is where we have our group meetings,” she tells me. Friends of Beaver Pond Park has ballooned to thirty strong since Bartow activated the group, and she is proud and resolute of this fact. Tucked beside the benches, a flower garden throws its scent into the hard wind. 

“All of our volunteers have kids. And this, for years, has been their garden. They immediately gravitate here,” Bartow says. “As they grow, they keep coming back — they get water from the pond, check on their plants and how they’ve grown.”