English Station Looms Over Fair Haven Walk

A derelict power plant. A neighborhood school. A vibrant community history of hardship and resilience. And the ticking clock of climate change.

All these elements came together in the first of a series of walking tours — a collaboration among several public and nonprofit entities put together by Anstress Farwell, president of the New Haven Urban Design League — focusing on the decommissioned and toxic English Station power plant and the Mill River District in Fair Haven.

“Despite its contaminated state and deep challenges, English Station has been described as the ​‘crown jewel’ of New Haven because of its prominence on the city skyline and its critical significance as a linchpin for the revitalization of New Haven’s post-industrial landscape,” the walk’s description stated. ​“Once a symbol of New Haven’s decline, with the right combination of community support and political will, English Station is poised to become both a symbol and catalyst of a remarkable renaissance.”

In the course of a mile and a half, about 30 participants learned on Monday about the history of the station and the ongoing efforts to remediate the toxic site and improve the health of the neighborhood — which is happening as the city plans for a revitalized Mill River District to support businesses in Fair Haven and possibly expand residential and commercial uses along the now industrial waterfront.

Running throughout the walk was the idea that this revitalization could happen within the fascinating building of the power plant itself, which holds the potential to be transformed, from community liability to neighborhood center.

Monday’s walk will be repeated twice more, on Sept. 25 and Oct. 23, and can be attended for free with an RSVP. Collaborating organizations included the City of New Haven, CitySeed, Bioregional Group, Fair Haven Community Management Team, UConn’s CIRCA program, Grand Avenue Special Services District, Junta for Progressive Action, MATCH, Mill River Watershed Association, Mill River Trail Association, New Haven Urban Design League, Save the Sound, and Site Projects.

From Pollinator Gardens To Civil War History

The walk began at John S. Martinez School on James Street, where participants got a first taste of the kind of environmental efforts already afoot in Fair Haven.

Ron Walters, president of the Mill River Watershed Association, explained how the pollinator garden in front of the school came to be. Two years ago the association got a $1,000 award from the New Haven Garden Club. ​“We were looking to take that money and put it into plants,” Walters said. Half went to restoration planting along some of the trails the association helps maintain. ​“The other half, we were trying to figure out what to do.” Through Save the Sound and the Southwest Conservation District, they had contacts at Martinez, who had the idea for a pollinator garden.

“This was all just lawn here,” Walters said, motioning to the rectangle of flowers and grasses, still busy with pollinating insects.

To make the garden, in the fall of 2022, they put down cardboard, covered it with wood chips, and waited until the spring. ​“Then we went to Urbanscapes” — the plant nursery in Newhallville — ​“and spent $500 on plants.” Martinez students planted them, and ​“two years later this is what we ended up with,” Walters said, ​“a beautiful pollinator garden that has a few weeds in it, but it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing — attracting butterflies, bees,” and ​“creating a better environment.”

The walk continued, taking participants by Manufacturing And Technical Community Hub (MATCH), the nonprofit job training center on Mill Street, to highlight its mural, painted by Victoria Martinez, and the way that the special paint used for the mural, which reflects heat, can help cool the building down. The message was clear: in Fair Haven, these and other small projects (some of which would be detailed later), taken together, are adding up to a neighborhood push to improve the urban environment and make it healthier for its residents.

In Criscuolo Park, Lee Cruz, of the Fair Haven Community Management Team, gave a sense of the richness of the neighborhood, as well as how much is at stake in the efforts to improve the environment within it. He began millennia ago with the Algonquin-speaking people who first lived in the area. He reminded the group that ​“386 years ago, a Black woman, who we only know as Lucretia, was brought here, enslaved. We do not have a last name for her.”

He described the Colored Regiment Monument in Criscuolo Park,​“one of less than 40 monuments in the entire United States that recognizes the sacrifice of Black men in all the wars that the United States has fought.” In the Civil War era, the soldiers were garrisoned on River Street and practiced in the park, ​“and no less a person than Frederick Douglass stood on this very land, right now,” and told the soldiers to fight for their citizenship. Douglass ​“lived to regret saying those words,” Cruz said, because it took 100 years for those rights to be fully realized.

He described the successive waves of immigration to Fair Haven, from Irish, Italian, and Polish people, to the Puerto Rican population that first showed up to pick apples in Guilford, to people from Mexico, Ecuador, and a dozen other Latin American countries who make up the majority of Fair Haven’s population.

Today, Cruz said, Fair Haven — defined as the peninsula between the Mill and Quinnipiac rivers — is home to 19,500 people. It is 62 percent Latino, with half of them from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Ecuador. Another quarter of the neighborhood is of African descent. The majority are ​“from across town,” Cruz said, displaced by urban revitalization in the 1960s and 1970s. Another group is from the Caribbean. ​“New Haven has a historic relationship with Jamaica, Bermuda, and all islands in the Caribbean” thanks to trade routes established centuries ago, Cruz said. Another 4 percent are Asian, mostly from Southeast Asia. The final 15 percent are White — mostly Italian, Polish, and Irish, with a few English and Quebecois.

“These are the peoples that compose our neighborhood,” Cruz said. ​“The history we’re going to share with you, the knowledge that we have, the things we’ve been able to accomplish in this neighborhood, and the things that hold us back — all those things are because we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.” For Cruz, it was paramount not to forget ​“the impact that they had, that they have now, and that they will continue to have into the future.… The stories we’re about to tell you are their stories — and they have become our stories.”

Pollution, & Improvements

At a point in the park alongside the river, which allowed a view of nearly the entire harbor, Cruz swept his arm across the shore opposite the park. ​“Every manmade structure” there, he said, ​“is contributing to the degradation of the environment in this neighborhood.”

That sweep began with English Station and its contamination. Moving south, Cruz took in the state facility storing sand and salt piles to de-ice highways in the wintertime across Connecticut. Next to that was Suzio York Hill Construction, which had put a strip of grass between its facility and the river, but was still a source of dust. ​“There’s a high prevalence of asthma in our neighborhood,” Cruz said. Continuing south led to the oil tanks along the coast, which have been the subject of a lawsuit against Shell Oil for failure to protect New Haven from harmful chemicals during storms and for ongoing environmental damage under the Clean Water Act. And, of course, there was the interchange of I‑91 and I‑95.

“Each one of these is contributing just a bit,” Cruz said. ​“You may notice the prevailing wind,” blowing inland. In other words, while the focus of the walk was the derelict power plant, ​“It’s not just about English Station. It’s not just about the tanks,” and ​“it’s not just about the sand and the salt. It’s the combination of all of these things” and the effect on ​“the baseline health of our community — predominantly Black and Latino — that is plagued by what happens here.”

Farwell noted that ​“you’ll see this is a neighborhood that is making gigantic investments and improvements,” in schools, homes, and businesses. ​“People are taking a chance” on Fair Haven, to the cumulative total of ​“millions and millions of dollars, and one of the issues is that UI isn’t living up to its legal obligations” to spend $40 million to clean up English Station.

“This is the community most impacted,” she added, ​“but it also impacts everyone in this region.” It began with the ​“vast amounts of land” along the Mill River ​“that is underutilized and looks derelict,” when ​“it has so much potential” to be ​“a really wonderful place.”

English Station: What A Mess

How did English Station reach its current level of dilapidation? Kathy Czepiel, land protector manager at Save the Sound, offered details about the history and current state of English Station, compiled by Save the Sound senior legal director Roger Reynolds and data analyst Mo Zhang. Located on Ball Island, which the Mill River flows around, English Station operated first as a coal-fired plant, then as an oil-fired plant, from 1929 to 1992. Its closure left a ​“huge pollution problem,” Czepiel said, for Fair Haven, the Mill River, and the Long Island Sound.

In 2000, United Illuminating, which ran English Station, transferred the plant’s ownership to Quinnipiac Energy. ​“When they transferred ownership, they also attempted to transfer liability,” Czepiel said, paying Qunnipiac Energy $4.25 million to deal with it. On May 16, 2000, Quinnipiac Energy submitted a permit application to run the oil-based boilers and supply power on peak days — the hottest days of the year. Save the Sound — then called Connecticut Fund for the Environment — with the City of New Haven and then-Attorney General Dick Blumenthal worked to challenge the decision at the then state Department of Environmental Protection.

The level of emissions from English Station complied with the federal Clean Air Act, as it fell within its mandates for annual use. But the coalition’s toxicologist testified that, on those hottest days of the year, admissions to hospitals or emergency rooms could rise by 7 percent, due to respiratory problems or other ailments, for every 10 cubic milligrams of particulate matter the station released. In a ​“surprise decision,” Czepiel said, the DEP agreed, and denied Quinnipiac Energy its permit.

The plant has been mothballed since then. In 2006, Quinnipiac Energy sold English Station to two joint owners, Evergreen Power and Asnat Realty. In 2009, a UI spokesman told the Independent that this meant obligations to remediate the site, for PCBs and other contaminants, rested with those companies.

In 2013, the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection issued an administrative order to clean up land and water contamination at English Station, but ​“put the water cleanup on indefinite hold to focus on land pollution first,” Czepiel said. ​“Even that order was not vigorously enforced.”

In 2016, the Spanish energy company Iberdrola-Avangrid bought UI. As a condition of that merger, Mayor Toni Harp and then-Attorney General George Jepsen secured an agreement for the company to put at least $30 million toward remediating the site by 2019. ​“We can all see how that went,” Czepiel said. Some remediation has been done, but ​“they have only spent $18 million and completion is obviously nowhere in sight.” In response, state Attorney General William Tong has asked for and received a $2 million-per-year penalty against UI through DEEP’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority until UI finishes remediation. ​“That is pending on appeal,” Czepiel said.

“To be clear,” Czepiel said, quoting a statement from Reynolds, ​“UI has a legal obligation to clean up the property regardless of the merger and regardless of how much it costs. In that vein, Attorney General Tong filed a lawsuit in Superior Court to require the full cleanup of the land part of the site. Despite a clear obligation to clean up, Avangrid has chosen to fight that suit and it is scheduled for trial in April 2026.” (Click here to read a 2019 Independent investigation into English Station’s ownership history after UI.)

Meanwhile, while land cleanup is ​“slowly moving forward,” addressing water contamination has yet to begin. ​“The Mill River is a tidal river,” so pollution from the plant ​“affects what happens upstream” and ​“what happens downriver, and out into the Sound,” from fish and shellfish to human contact. ​“While the cleanup of the building is a priority,” Czepiel said, ​“we want to see UI live up to its responsibilities to clean the river as well.”

Cruz’s point that English Station’s plight was, in part, emblematic of a larger problem was borne out by Chris Ozyck, of Urban Resources Initiative. At a stop on Chapel Street, he asked participants on the walk to notice the booms in the river, which he said were there to hold back — with varying degrees of success — oil and gas plumes from entering the river. This was because the site used to be the gasworks for the city. ​“Here they made natural gas,” Ozyck said, and fill from the site, laden with coal ash and other chemicals, ​“is all underneath where we are right now,” as well as on Ball Island. As the site has deteriorated and some infrastructure has collapsed, there have been ​“huge amounts of oil and coal going into the river,” documented in DEEP’s 2013 consent order. In addition, the facility ​“used to taker PCB-laden oil to hose down the coal to keep it from being dusty, and then they would burn that,” causing air pollution.

“We know what’s underneath the ground here,” Ozyck said. He turned to the salt piles; some of that salt had to be ending up in the river. ​“Why do we devalue this river so much?” he asked, when we could ​“value the river, and value the people using it.” People fish and crab from the river now, knowing it’s unsafe to eat the catch, ​“and it’s really sad,” Ozyck said. Likewise, the trees that once lined Chapel Street there ​“succumbed to the salt” from the highway facility nearby.

“All this industry contributes to why Fair Haven is the hottest neighborhood in the city,” Ozyck said. But ​“there are solutions. There are ways to clean this up,” he added, to ​“make it safe for ecology purposes.” It was even possible to restore marshes to Fair Haven. ​“It takes lots of people and lots of voices to change the mindset of ​‘it’s always been,’ and we can all dream and see that ​‘no, it doesn’t have to be.’ ”

Along those lines, Nate Hougrand, the city’s deputy director of zoning, invited participants to attend a public workshop about the city’s comprehensive plan for development, happening at the Wilson branch library on Sept. 28.

Zoning lies at the heart of any attempt to change the way citizens use and think about land, and Hougrand was there to detail some aspects of how zoning in New Haven is changing, to ​“eliminate a lot of the barriers when it comes to development.” He highlighted the city’s 2019 effort to create denser and more pedestrian-friendly commercial gateway districts, which was ultimately adopted for Whalley Avenue in 2020. ​“The idea was to create a transitional zone from the larger-scale downtown … to the more residential areas of two- and three-family homes,” Hougrand said. The city is now working on a municipal development plan to rezone strictly industrial areas to allow for residential and commercial uses, which could in turn create some incentive for more and better remediation of those areas. ​“We continue to amend the zoning ordinance to allow for the development that we want to see,” which is why community input could be so crucial. On the shores of the Mill River — now an entirely industrial place — such changes could be transformative.

There is also a chance to avoid some of the mistakes of New Haven’s mid-20th-century urban renewal era and pursue development from the ground up, through the communities in the area. Along those lines, East Rock / Fair Haven Alder Caroline Smith highlighted the Mill River Underpass Project, to create an underpass park beneath I‑91 off of State Street, featuring a youth design team of high school students. ​“We imagine that site as a gateway to the burgeoning Mill River District,” Smith said, allowing a chance to rethink how neighborhoods there could be better integrated — of ​“mitigating some of the harm of I‑91” and ​“reconnect the neighborhoods that have been divided by I‑91 since the mid-1900s.”

By this point in the walk, there was a keen sense that the kind of development work everyone was talking about would likely be the work of decades. Aaron Goode of the New Haven Bioregional Group injected some urgency into that thinking by gathering in front of the UI switching station on Grand Avenue, talking about how that ​“critical infrastructure” is threatened by ​“rising sea levels and extreme weather events resulting from anthropogenic climate change. Some of us have a recurring nightmare about a Category 5 hurricane barreling into New Haven harbor with an 18-foot storm surge taking out the bulkhead of English Station, which is all that’s preventing it from sliding into the harbor. In the same nightmare scenario, the storm disables this facility behind me,” which would result in ​“500,000 people losing power for several weeks.” The switching stations, Goode said, are the ​“real workhorses of the electricity grid.”

Nobody, Goode said, probably questions the wisdom of spending millions to maintain the switching station or upgrade its decades-old equipment. ​“We all understand there is a genuine need for grid modernization to accommodate electrification of the transportation sector,” as could happen as people switch to electric vehicles. But ​“the devil’s in the details,” and it’s possible to question how these efforts are carried out, and whether they’re done with community input. The switching station upgrade approved a few years ago was supposed to include ​“streetscape improvements, tree planting, greenery to make this facility less of an eyesore. That never happened.” In an experience mirrored in other towns, and with its aggressive tree-trimming program, in Goode’s view, ​“UI has a problem being a good neighbor.”

This comes to a head in the question about English Station. ​“Why is UI spending $64 million here, behind me, but not a dime on making English Station climate proof until they’re forced to do so?” Goode asked. Such questions, for Goode, should perhaps be on lawmakers’ minds as they ​“move toward a performance-based regulation model for our utilities,” which, as an op-ed in the Mirror stated, ​“makes the utilities partners in reducing costs and can accelerate the achievement of Connecticut’s environmental and climate goals by supporting a clean and affordable energy system.”

Sure. It's A Mess. But Also Kind Of Beautiful

But the building, polluted as it was, didn’t have to be only a problem to be solved. It could perhaps be put to use in a larger revitalization plan. Participants heard from Michael Berindei, a photographer who had been inside English Station (like New Haven photographer Chris Randall was in 2012) and could report on some of its architectural features and chance to be turned into something else, rather than razed. When he visited several years ago, he noticed the ​“crenulations at the top of the boiler house” that gave it a ​“castle-like, Gothic look.” The front entrance had an awning over the door that looked like a medieval drawbridge. A sign labeling the building’s name was in fine Art Deco style. The turbine hall was gutted out, but the ​“hall itself was still incredible,” of buffed, polished, cream-colored brick. ​“Just standing in that hall, you get a sense of the massiveness of the building.” The boiler house, where coal would have been burned, still had all of its boilers. The original control room, about 100 feet long, was completely intact.

How and why was it built this way? For Berindei, part of the reason may have been to hide ​“the unpleasantries that come with a coal-fired power plant.” But also, in the 1920s, the question of public versus private utilities was perhaps more open than it is now, and a private utility — as English Station was — was ​“always under the threat of a potential public takeover, or losing some of the regulatory leniency they had,” so there was incentive to put on a ​“display of civics.”

“They were really trying to masquerade as a public institution,” he said, and one that echoed the Gothic architecture in New Haven’s civic, religious, and educational buildings. This made English Station an ​“extremely unique building.”

“It would be a really great ending for the building to see the architecture reclaimed to represent civics and the city’s values once again.”

Those values could include greater emphasis on preserving green spaces and creating new ones. J.R. Logan, a volunteer for the Mill River Trail Association, was up next to talk about the trail’s ongoing development. The plan for the trail — which is currently in segments, and is the product of collaboration among a few public and private entities — is to eventually connect East Rock Park and Criscuolo Park with one, unbroken path along the riverbank. ​“We have done weekly workdays through the summers,” Logan said, removing invasive species, picking up trash, and planting trees. ​“So it’s a long process.”

The trail proceeds by ​“leveraging a law,” Logan said, by which the city can acquire easements to create the trail when riverfront properties change hands. Currently ​“it’s not established in all places” and ​“we have to navigate around some of the infrastructure,” but he hopes that as the trail continues to develop, ​“it becomes more valued and more used,” with ​“more people taking care of it.”

But like Goode, John Truscinski of the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation was there to talk about how time was of the essence. CIRCA has been working with the city and the community management team on Resilient Fair Haven, a year-and-a-half-long study to determine ​“how climate change is going to impact this neighborhood in particular.”

The area of Grand Avenue and John Murphy Drive, Truscinski said, was of particular interest as a flood zone, a place that would ​“become more chronically flooded,” especially with the expectation that ​“sea levels rise by up to 20 inches by 2050.” If that happens, the area floods ​“every 10 years or so.”

Elevating John Murphy Drive could protect it and surrounding areas. The bridge to Ball Island will also have to rise. ​“Whatever happens at English Station and Ball Island,” Truscinski said, ​“it’s going to have to adapt to this changing flood risk.”

Farwell finished the tour by talking about how important the particular entrance at Grand Avenue to the neighborhood was to Fair Haven’s special services district. ​“It affects the vitality of their main street, and they need to see it better,” she said. Junta and Save the Sound have been collaborating to hear from Fair Haveners about ​“what their environmental concerns are and how they want to have it solved.”

What can be done with English Station? ​“You can see something going in there that can lift up the whole area. Because it’s in such trouble now, it’s dragging the whole area down.” But ​“it can become the key to really setting a spark for this area to come together, and to make good on every good thing that you see happening here.” The former power plant could become, for example, a museum, a market, an arts hub, a technical school, or — owing to its size — all of the above. The building is ​“so big you can probably do multiple things in it,” Farwell said.

While waiting for UI to clean up English Station, Farwell said, interested people could ​“put our heads together and think about what is it that everyone wants, and what fits best here.… It’s going to take some time, and I hope all of us can stay together, and stay in touch.”

The English Station walking tour happens again on Sept. 25 and Oct. 23 at 5:30 p.m., and can be attended for free with an RSVP.