Parks Chief Focuses “All Hands” On Green Renewal

BY PAUL BASS

For one glimpse of how Max Webster is steering New Haven’s parks system into a new quarter-century, you could look at the old Edgewood Park soccer field.

Make sure it’s not raining. Or bring boots if it is. Because the field gets soggy fast.

You get there by walking down the steps on the west side of the Chapel Street Bridge over the West River or by following a trail behind the Parks Department’s Edgewood Avenue building.

You used to find a soccer field there. Then in 2012 replacement of vintage-1920s tidal gates south of Route 1 allowed incoming tides to flow into the West River, transforming the surrounding habitat — including the soccer field. It flooded more often, and became more of a wetland.

At first the city tried to keep mowing the lawn and having soccer games there. Eventually nature took its course: The Parks Department let vegetation grow in the center of the field while mowing the perimeter so people could walk around it.

Now, under Webster’s guidance, the Parks Department is both allowing nature to take its course and enlisting the community to help steer what happens there. The Parks Department is considering creating a bird sanctuary there: Taking advantage of how the changed environment attracted more birds, while examining how to refine the land through planning, for instance examining what trees the birds like to nest in and whether they like standing in dead trees. Webster has enlisted a local Eagle Scout to help draw up a plan.

Now multiply that natural habitat planning to over 100 park sites citywide — and you’ll have a sense of what Webster is up to.

Webster, who’s 36, talked about the soccer field-bird sanctuary transition and about his broader plans during a conversation Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.

Webster took over as Parks Department chief in November 2024. The department had gone through two major changes — from “parks and rec” to a combined department with public works; then back down to just “parks,” no rec.

Webster’s job has been, first, to figure out how to run the newly downsized, short-staffed department. And second, to do something bigger: Draw up a new strategic long-term plan for how New Haven should run its public greenspaces. The first such plan in 25 years.

The plan’s called the “All Hands For New Haven Parks” initiative. It looks at how best to use Parks Department staff and community volunteers and to prioritize planning for waterways, trails, programs, mowing, trash …

It has featured months of public feeback sessions, surveys, planning meetings. Webster said they’ll release the report soon after some finishing touches.

He did say he learned that people are far more concerned about litter than overgrown grass.

And he read aloud the “All Hands” new vision statement:

“Fostering a culture of public stewardship and collaboration to create a vibrant park system that is open and accessible for all.”

“It’s less about how do we do everything as a department and more about how do we set up the right kinds of access and opportunities for folks to bring their creativity, to bring their perspectives, to bring their energy into park spaces and [be] positive,” Webster added.

In other words: How to do the staff work as well as link up with groups like Urban Resources Initiative (URI, an “All Hands” co-convener not to mention partner in planting trees citywide) and different neighborhood Parkfriends to make parks work better for New Haven humans, not to mention native species and migratory birds.

Part of that process involves recognizing how park land naturally grows and changes, and how to work with those changes. As in the case of the former Edgewood soccer field.

In the process, Webster is working with his staff as well on a master tree plan, as well as plans to connect waterways. That includes a current plan to pave a multi-use path through East Shore and Fort Hale parks in the latest step toward a 4.4-mile, car-free New Haven addition to the 24-mile Shoreline Greenway from East Haven to Madison. (Read about that here.)

A lifelong urban parks devotee (“I could navigate you through those spaces blind” in Cincinnati greenspaces like Alms Park, given the amount of time he spent there as a kid), Webster said he found inspiration for the greenway plan — connecting the public more to the water — in Chicago. Webster worked as the Chicago Park District’s natural areas manager after his graduation from Yale School of Forestry (where he would make time to lead school kids on walks along the Mill River and help URI plant and prune hundreds of trees). Webster was awed by contiguous miles of waterfront open to the public in Chi-Town.

Connecticut as a whole has much to learn from Chicago when it comes to adding waterfront public access, he argued.

“It is special and amazing that you can hop on the waterfront and go across so many different neighborhoods,” he said “It’s a bridge between all those different neighborhoods.”