After a recent fire in a fourth-floor utility room sparked conversations to renovate the former Hamden Middle School at 560 Newhall St, many residents are voicing their concerns regarding the building’s safety.
The building, formerly known as the Michael J Whalen Middle School, was constructed in 1956. Built on top of a landfill, the site where the school sits was used to dispose of industrial and domestic waste from the late 1800s until 1950. Dumping continued until 1976, 20 years after the former middle school was built.
In 2002 the town of Hamden closed the school and the building has remained vacant since then.
Now, over 20 years after the building became vacant, plans to demolish the former middle school and turn it into a youth and arts center are on the town’s to-do list. However, some Hamden residents have expressed reservations about the cleanup of the site.
“I feel like it’d be very hard for you to convince me that the Hamden town government had made that a safe place for kids to be,” Hamden resident Ariana Mongillo said.
Despite residents’ concerns, the Regional Water Authority and the town of Hamden worked in partnership to clean the contaminated land.
In May 2021, environmental planning manager John Hudak delivered a presentation to the Regional Water Authority Environmental, Health and Safety Committee that stated the land’s contamination was not reported until some time between 1979 and 1990. He added that the primary contaminants were lead, arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Hamden Mayor Lauren Garrett, whose administration is planning to redevelop the site, told HQNN in an email on Oct. 31 that the land was remediated through a partnership with the Regional Water Authority and supervised by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Four feet of the contaminated fill was removed and replaced with four feet of clean fill on top, Garrett wrote.
“We regularly test the soil in the Newhall area again under the supervision of DEEP,” Garrett wrote.
Talks of developing the old middle school into a community center have been ongoing since May, Garrett said.
“During the summer, those plans solidified into a community campus with the addition of an Arts Hub on the site as well,” Garrett wrote. “This would include demolition of the buildings and then building a community center with ARPA funding and an Arts Hub with Community Investment Funds through state grants.”
In addition to remodeling the building, Garrett said that the town is working with Albertus Magnus College to use the fields in the back of the area for recreational sports.
However, for some who attended the school before its closure, the thought of repurposing the land would be history repeating itself.
Hamden resident Gregory Foster Jr. attended the former middle school for seventh and eighth grade from 1991-1993. As a lifelong Hamden resident, he said the land contamination was “kind of a common thing that everyone just knew.”
“We actually had teachers, some of them would tell us ‘do not drink from the water fountains whatsoever,’” Foster said. “And then they would also say that the ground was sour, the ground was contaminated.”
However, Foster said that he would primarily see the effects of the contamination during the hotter months of the academic year.
“You would actually see the ground was wavy,” Foster said. “We would be out there running or playing, kids would be throwing up, kids would be talking about they had headaches, and we would go immediately to the nurse.”
Foster said he would repetitively feel nauseous and undergo headaches after spending any amount of time outside playing on the land during school.
Despite having no choice but to physically stay in the building to receive an education, Foster said it wasn’t until he left the school that he started to notice what he believed to be physical repercussions of the contaminated building.
“When I ended up graduating and starting Hamden High (School), you would start hearing stories about how some of the teachers that were there just started kind of dropping like flies,” Foster said.
Doctors diagnosed Foster with thyroid cancer despite having no family history of the disease. He said he believes the cancer is directly linked to his time spent in the building.
There is no medical documentation directly linking the diseases of those, including Foster, to the contaminated land that the middle school was built on.
For some residents who did not grow up in the town nor attend the school, the tale of the building’s contaminated land has been one that they’ve learned since moving to the town.
“It was kind of almost like a running joke,” Mongillo said. “People that were there would be like, ‘Oh, yeah, our middle school was on a landfill and everyone got cancer.’”
Mongillo, who moved to Hamden in 2004, said her only knowledge of the building is from her high school daughter telling her that it had “become a hang-out for people doing not great things.” With plans to refurbish the vacant building in the talks, she said is confused as to “what the need is.”
“Now it’s this rundown beat up building,” Mongillo said. “And the town for some reason is trying to salvage it. To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me in a town that’s broke.”
Mongillo said that “there has to be a more cost effective solution,”for the site, but also emphasized the importance of safety for the Hamden youth.
Until then, Garrett told HQNN that the town is reaching out to community members by attending events and scheduling meetings to invite input regarding the future of the former middle school’s site.
“The council is getting more feedback from the public to determine if this is how we should spend our ARPA funding,” Garrett said.
One reply on “Hamden wants an arts hub in the former middle school site, but is the land safe?”
I was deeply involved in this issue from the beginning because I was the Fifth District member of the Legislative Council. Yes, the ground was contaminated and, yes, it has been remediated.
However, much of the furor surrounding the issue related to the desire to move the Middle School out of the south end of town for OTHER very obvious reasons.
No proof was ever presented of a negative impact on health of working at or attending the school (as both my children did). In any large cohort, there will ALWAYS be cases of cancer and other diseases. Proving causation is very difficult and often impossible. No causation was proved – in particular because one would expect a SPECIFIC kind of cancer or illness to be associated with SPECIFIC contamination. No such specific association, let alone causation, was discovered.
Moreover, even clusters can be generated randomly. Take a big basket of pennies and throw them on the floor; many pennies will be spread over the floor but some will inevitably be in clusters.
Then there was the mold issue – it turned out (at great expense to the town) that there were more moldy spores in the air OUTSIDE the building than in the building.
I never worried about my children having been at the middle school and I’d have no problem attending programs there.
It was ironic that, after hearings at which parents spoke vociferously in favor of moving the school, I would see the same parents hop into their cars, light a cigarette and drive off without fastening their seatbelts.