A New View Emerges After Building Demolition

By Kendra Bobowick

Bridgeport Hall’s cupolas jut above the distant tree line, piercing the sky above a gentle horizon. The rooftop decorations on the one-story building also reach higher than the crumbled brick mounds that once formed Greenwich House — now scrubbed from the Fairfield Hills landscape.

“It’s a huge difference visually,” said Public Works Director Fred Hurley.

An uninterrupted view now extends from the Newtown Youth Academy at the back of the campus, skips across Bridgeport Hall and lands beyond Wasserman Way in the distance — opening a clear panorama once blocked by Greenwich’s broad brick façade that stood until last week immediately in front of the academy.

With work in progress to renovate Bridgeport Hall to house the municipal and education board offices, buildings being razed, and plan being developed to lease those buildings viable for reuse, a new story emerges from the former state psychiatric hospital’s structures and streets.

Clearer each day is the campus’s new community-based personality. Already the youth academy has become a popular destination in town for parents, athletes, youth, and fitness-minded residents. Begun is the bustle to reestablish town and education offices, install a central green, parking, and landscaping. Gas and electric infrastructure has been completed, and sports schedules keep the fields occupied. In planning is a new community center to welcome both senior and Parks and Recreation department programming.

Mr Hurley has begun to “get the idea of how it will look finished up,” he said Wednesday. By October he hopes that the town clerk, assessor, registrar, judge of probate, school superintendent, etc, will begin their move to Fairfield Hills. This week Clerk of the Works Bill Knight and Mr Hurley confirmed that the gas lines and electricity are completed and working. In past weeks Claris Construction had dismantled and removed materials at Greenwich House. The multiwinged building shrunk bite by bite as sections of roof came down, areas of exterior walls fell, and various materials were separated and carted away. Remaining amid portions of new curbing and planted trees are piles of crumbled brick and debris.