The Rippowam River ambles along just west of Washington Boulevard in Stamford, winding under the Broad Street bridge and into the Mill River Park and Greenway, a verdant space separating West Stamford from downtown.
Natural vegetation grows along the sloped river banks in the park, the tall grasses, wildflowers and trees creating a habitat for rabbits and birds. And while the river neatly slices through the park, babbling over the rocks as it flows toward Stamford Harbor and the Long Island Sound, 10 years ago this park was in a state of decay and the river was choked with sediment.
In the last decade, the Mill River Collaborative has worked to transform the landscape along the Rippowam River to a ribbon of parkland for Stamford”™s residents. In May 2013, the first phase of the project opened between Broad Street and Main st.
Walking into the park from Washington Boulevard, Mill River Collaborative Executive Director Milton Puryear recalled what the space used to look like.
“There was a full dam here, plus a 1,000-foot-long mill pond with concrete walls on both sides,” Puryear said. “Inside, there was 18,000 cubic yards of sediment with stuff growing out of it. It wasn”™t really a pond. It was a mess ”” shopping carts, motorcycles, bicycles, televisions.”¦ When we emptied the pond, we found four dumpsters that had been washed off of banks during floods and tumbled their way down to the dam.”
Though the river course has existed here for untold thousands of years, settlers began damming the river in the mid-1600s, altering its course and impeding its flow for commercial purposes. The dam and mill pond that were near Mill River Collaborative”™s offices at 1010 Washington Blvd. were built in about 1920 for the Diamond Ice Co. but fell into disuse long ago. That dam and another near the Pulaski Street bridge farther downstream have been removed at a cost of $8 million, $5 million of which came from federal funds and the remainder from municipal money.
“The estimated cost of all the improvements when we made our master plan was $60 million,” Puryear said. “We decided to raise a third of that from private sources because we knew the municipal budget wouldn”™t give us the kind of park that would change the game for downtown Stamford.”
With the first phase of the master plan completed, Puryear and his staff have begun to focus on raising funds for phase two, which will extend the park down to Richmond Hill Avenue, as well as raising funds for a sculptural trellis, skating rink and fountain, and park building. Phase three would extend the greenway and park all the way to Pulaski Street.
In addition to revitalizing the river corridor, the Mill River Collaborative is creating educational opportunities. A program for high school students, the Mill River Stewards, gives teenagers a hands-on internship caring for the park and exposes them to careers in environmental stewardship. Fourth-graders from the Hart Magnet Elementary School have used the park as an outdoor classroom to learn about ecological science.
For the high school students, “It”™s a mixture of environmental stewardship where they learn what it”™s like to take care of a river habitat, and they”™re focusing on not just a job in conservation, but a job, period,” said Alex Domeyko, the program and outreach manager for Mill River Collaborative. “The fourth-graders, periodically we have them come out and do a field trip. In the fall, we got them in the river and they searched for macro-invertebrates, and taught them how macro-invertebrates are an indicator of the health of the river.”
For Puryear, park management is a second career. A former financial analyst, he began volunteering for the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative before becoming a full-time employee, and then moved on to become executive director of the Mill River Collaborative.
“I”™m working on something that will be around,” Puryear said. “I like cities, but I do like nature, and I”™m sensitive to the alienation that the built-up environment creates, both internally and with other people. By giving people the opportunity in cities to escape from the built environment, it humanizes the urban experience.”
