Wet and Wild: Soggy History of Ten Acre Swamp

Most of the GHS athletic fields are off limits due to discovery of contaminated soil when construction for the began this summer. Talk at the August 25 Board of Education meeting was full of references to “unusual soil” and “hot spots” to be remediated. 

Yet this is not a new story. This site has been controversial long before the 60’s baby boom resulted in Greenwich outgrowing its old high school (now Town Hall) and moving into a new building at the current Hillside Road site in 1970.

Oral histories in the contain evidence of warnings that went unheeded long before the Wetlands Act was passed in1972. Long before “fill” was brought in to combat soggy fields in the 1970s and again between 2003 and 2005.

The words of Robert Holbeck, who served on the RTM and BET and was a selectman in the mid 1960s, are foreboding. Holbeck was interviewed for the oral history project in 1976 at the age of 55.

Weighing in on the “new” high school, Holbeck said, “They built it where I used to ice skate; where the football field is. …My grandfather cut ice there for the icehouse…we would go to the ponds with our big saws and cut ice, and pay for it. But I skated there. That was Ten Acres… There’s no firm foundation there, you see. Mother Nature. You don’t fool with Mother Nature… Oh, the architects will build a catch basin. That’s all it is. It runs around the field.”

Holbeck went on to comment on the wisdom of cutting down trees to develop sites in Greenwich with underground springs. “We went in and cut down a lot of big trees. Now, a good-sized oak tree will use, oh, somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred gallons of water a day. We took out the tree. We took out the roots. Mother Nature has been coursing water underground for centuries. Suddenly we remove the trees. She gets a little angry so that water’s going to pop up somewhere. It’s got no place to go….The best you can do is to go along with Mother Nature…”

It would seem that Holbeck’s warnings were prescient. 

The 1976 GHS yearbook contains photos of a surprise visit of a helicopter attempting to remove the grandstand from the field on the north end of campus because of its “unstable land.” The plan was to relocate the athletic field to the “new track and field complex.” A subcommittee, created to oversee the project said they did not publicize the grandstand relocation because they had no way of controlling a large turnout.

In any event, the bleachers were too heavy to move in one visit. Though one section was relocated during the first attempt, the helicopter returned two weeks later to move the remainder, which had by then been dismantled into two portions.

According to Redding resident, Kristine Walsh, GHS class of 1977, “We knew it (GHS) was built on a swamp and the joke was during sports practices, that if it had rained AT ALL, that the only equipment they needed was a pair of rubber boots or a life raft! Rumors swirled that the school was sinking a smidge every year, and the joke was wishing it would happen before we graduated.”

Yet going back to the headlines of the 1960s and 70s, it seems the public was distracted by other controversies. In the 1960s, with growing enrollment and crowding at the old high school, townspeople were engaged in a protracted debate about having one or two high schools.

When the $15 million GHS on Hillside Road opened on Oct. 25, 1970, townspeople people were still hotly debating the disposition of the “old” high school. (A public referendum in 1977 resulted in a close decision to tear down the rear section of the former high school and renovate the front half. The building is now Town Hall.)

Fast forward to 2011, it seems the original error has compounded over the years. Today there are more questions than answers regarding all that water passing underground through shredded tires and “unusual soil” and “hot spots.” Will the situation impact property values? Will there be lawsuits? Is the brook moving pollution to adjacent Milbrook and Old Church Road neighborhoods and ultimately into Long Island Sound?  

On Thursday, Sept. 1st, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed at Town Hall by GHS neighbor, Bill Effros, who has owned his property on Old Church Road for over 30 years. 

Effros requests to see “all MISA Building Committee records, including all records generated by all outside consultants, contractors, and testing laboratories; as well as the minutes of all MISA Building Committee meetings, the record of votes taken at those meetings, and the agenda sent to your office no less than 24 hours before the meetings took place.”

The GHS PTA has announced a public information forum on the environmental impact of the MISA construction at Greenwich High School. It is scheduled for the first day of school, Wednesday, September 7, at 7:00 pm in the GHS auditorium.

Now it seems we should have heeded Holbeck’s advice: “The best you can do is to go along with Mother Nature.”