Working to preserve Beaver Pond Park

Amanda Howe
Staff Writer

After years of struggling to keep land safe from development, “not another inch,” has become the motto Nan Bartow said she lives by.

The land in question belongs to Beaver Pond Park in New Haven, which includes ponds, wetlands and in recent years, Southern Connecticut State University’s baseball field.

However, Robert Sheeley, administrator of facilities operations, said the baseball field was never on parklands.

“As far as the university is concerned, we haven’t taken any land,” said Sheeley. “The land was given to us. I even went in front of the New Haven Board of Park Commissioners and made a presentation that the land was going to be used for park and recreation.”

However, Bartow, a member of Friends of Beaver Pond Park and a New Haven resident, disagrees with Sheeley.

“The baseball field is a bone of contention,” Bartow said. “When SCSU was given the land, there was the impression that it wouldn’t be developed. The land used to be wetlands.”

Bartow said she believes she was right about the land belonging to the park, so she went to try and prove that Southern had been given parkland. She said she requested at city hall for maps to be drawn up to show the lines of demarcation.

“The maps show that the kettle pond and the baseball field belong to the park,” Bartow said, “but those lines are very fuzzy.”

The kettle pond is the small pond that lies between Engleman Hall and the baseball field. Bartow said that it is called a kettle pond because of how it came to be. A glacier would have left a depression that then filled with water and is seen today as a small pond.

Sheeley agreed that the lines are fuzzy, and said the lines are so vague they may not even be there. He said he has always been under the impression that the land was given to Southern fair and square.

“The only way to prove if we took the land is to have a title search,” Sheeley said. “We are in the process of doing that and that is when we will know if we took any land. But to my knowledge, we did not.”

Sheeley made one thing clear: he said he wanted to put all of this behind them and move forward in a partnership with Bartow. He said he also just wants to move away from the debate over who took what. He said he hopes this partnership can turn into something where Bartow and Southern can work together to improve how Southern’s natural outdoor setting can be enjoyed.

“I have a lot of respect for Nan. We support her in saving the park,” said Sheeley. “The university does as well. That land is a natural laboratory for the university and it needs to be developed. Not in the way that everyone perceives as bad, but in the sense that it needs more access so people can enjoy it more.”

One example Sheeley gave as a way to develop Southern’s “natural laboratory” would be to work around the kettle pond. He said he was thinking of putting a path and benches around the pond so people could go down and enjoy it. He also said Bartow would be more than welcome to come and help on that endeavor.

But, what Bartow said she is most concerned with at this point is more encroachment on the parkland. She said she fought off the idea of Southern taking more land and building a parking garage and hopes more land won’t be taken.

Behind the baseball field and rugby field is North Pond. Bartow said this is the area she wants to re-landscape. She said one big issue is there is a plant, called the phragmite, a form of invasive vegetation, which is exotic in nature to Connecticut and provides little to no food with only some shelter while it takes over the waterways.

Invasive vegetation is defined as “non-native plants that are disruptive in a way that cause environmental or economic harm, or harm to human health,” according to the Connecticut Invasive Plant Working Group Web site. Its list of invasive plants, as of January 2004, includes Phragmites australis, the plant that Bartow is trying to get rid of.

Bartow said she plans on cutting them down, which won’t get rid of them completely. She said, hopefully over time, they will die off. In the meantime, as the phragmites die, she said she plans to begin planting flowers and plants that are native to Connecticut and that will resemble an earlier landscape.

“Cattails are native and we’d like them and they won’t obscure the vision of the ponds,” said Bartow. Bartow said she also wants to include many flowers and berries to bring back nesting areas for birds and wildlife species.

When the time to re-landscape comes, the amount of work Bartow has planned for will not take two hands, but 82 hands, to get finished. On May 5, Bartow and around 40 members of an environmental group at Southern will get together to re-landscape North Pond.

“It will be the first time ever that there will be a true partnership with SCSU,” said Bartow.

This partnership will be between the Friends of Beaver Pond Park and Southern’s own student group, the Environmental Futurists. The group is comprised of 30 active members and 10 more students who support when they can, said Colin Bennett, a graduate student at Southern.

“The Environmental Futurists is Southern's only environmental organization,” Bennett said. “As such, we work to make the university more environmentally friendly. This semester, we unveiled a comprehensive plan for environmental sustainability at Southern. The primary focus of the plan is carbon neutrality.”

Bennett said the Futurists are also working on improving recycling on campus. And, they are not only trying to make these changes themselves, they also wish to create committee and coordinator positions within the Southern staff. He said the group had wanted to work on cleaning up the park, but had to put it on the back burner until they were introduced to Bartow.

“We became involved with the Friends of Beaver Pond Park through Nan Bartow,” Bennett said. “She had contacted some folks at the DEP that I had worked with previously and they passed along her information to me. I called her and she explained what her group was all about and asked if we could help.”

Since then, the Futurists and Bartow have coordinated a day, May 5, that will allow the environmental group and any Southern student to come out and help clean up the area around North Pond.

“The idea is to remove invasive species, introduce native plants, and clean up the litter that plagues the park,” Bennett said. “By doing so, we hope to bring attention to the area so Southern's administration will begin to take a greater responsibility for our area of the park.”

Bartow, Bennett and Sheeley all said this partnership would be best for students, staff and the environment.

“Then students will be able to have a greater appreciation of the park and will be able to enjoy it,” Bennett said. “It's really a jewel of a park, and the sooner it is recognized as such, the better. Ideally, Beaver Pond Park will be integrated into the identity of Southern Connecticut State University. The Environmental Futurists are glad to do our part to make this a reality.”

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