STAMFORD — After several months of plantings and other work, Mayor Michael Pavia and other city officials unveiled improvements at the 14-acre Rosa Hartman Park on the Stamford/Greenwich border that are hoped to attract more residents to picnic or walk through the area.
Pavia said he hopes the long-awaited improvements, including more cultivated landscaping at the park entrance on Brownhouse Road, will draw people to the park. The park declined in the 1980s, marred by graffiti and illegal dumping.
Pavia credited the city’s associate planner, Erin McKenna, the Parks and Recreation Commission and City Engineer Louis Casolo for expediting the project, which has been in the works since 2007.
The $185,500 contract to improve the park was awarded this past summer to Eastchester, N.Y., firm WJL Equities.
“It is a park that is basically categorized as a conservation area, though it has been used for picnicking, though not lately because of its deteriorated state,” Pavia said. “It’s a forgotten little gem that is about to be polished.”
Land for Rosa Hartman Park was donated in 1955 by Jesse Hartman to be used for a public purpose and named for his mother. The park is adjacent to the heavily wooded 18-acre Laddins Rock Sanctuary in Greenwich.
The Rosa Hartman Park is still used by some walkers, in particular nature lovers and birdwatching groups who tour it and the contiguous Laddins Rock Sanctuary because the area is a migratory stopover for several bird species, McKenna said.
If the park sees a growth in use, city planners will consider pursuing as-yet-unfunded improvement ideas like a pavilion, a bathroom, additional parking and a traffic circle to facilitate traffic flow, McKenna said.
“First we’d like to see what the demand is to do this renovation and see how the people use the park,” McKenna said.
City Rep. Benjamin Velishka, D-2, a member of the Waterside Coalition, said residents appreciated efforts by Pavia and McKenna to fast-track the project this fall.
“There had been no financial investment by the city for many, many years, so getting the parking lot redone and fixing up some of the paths is a good start,” Velishka said.
Discussion of improving the park has gone on since the 1990s, when then-Mayor Dannel P. Malloy described it as a park “in name only.” Under his watch, the city boards approved a kind of mini-amusement park to be built on the parcel, but met with resistance from conservationists and the town of Greenwich, which borders the park, as well as the Algonquin Confederacy of the Quinnipiac Tribal Council and the Connecticut Historic Preservation Office, which maintained the park is an Indian burial ground and archaeological site.
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