GROUND-LEVEL OPPORTUNITY
Former ‘Trashmore’ site awaits plans for new uses
BRIDGEPORT — Heavy equipment groaned, pushing dirt to be sprayed with water and flattened by a steamroller.
“I just can’t believe it,” said City Councilman Ernie Newton, as he looked over the nearly flat site at 329 Central Ave. that once housed the infamous “Mount Trashmore.” “It’s like living in another world.”
By the end of September, the flattening and capping is to be completed.
“I expect by late autumn we’ll be ready to issue a request for proposals,” Mayor Joe Ganim. “We’ll be looking to the community leaders, the religious leaders and the East End residents for suggestions on what they want to see here.”
Bill Coleman, the city’s deputy director of the Office of Planning and Economic Development, said the area’s flood plain would limit its uses.
“It could be a senior housing site,” he said.
Flash back 37 years and the garbage pile drew national attention. It was dubbed Mount Trashmore — a 35-foot high mountain of rotting wood, broken bricks, flaking wallboard and twisted aluminium stretching across 2 1⁄2 acres. The 35,000-ton dump served as a testament to the demolition prowess of Geno and Russell Capozziello and their now defunct Connecticut Building Wrecking Co.
It also provided home for rodents who would scamper out at night and raid neighborhood garbage cans and basements. The mountain was a bane for firefighters called out to douse the spontaneous combustion inside.
And the smell? East Enders would tell you they kept their windows closed
— even without air conditioning — during summer heat waves.
“It was horrible,” recalls William Minor, a member of the East End Baptist Tabernacle Church.
The site, smell and health impact so angered East End and East Side residents that they turned to their churches for help. On more than 80 Sundays, the Rev. Vernon Thompson, then pastor of the East End Baptist Tabernacle Church, ended services leading his parishioners on a march to the site singing “We Shall Overcome” and praying for the mountain’s removal.
Thompson and the Interdenominational Alliance then turned to a higher power — the Rev. Jesse Jackson — who was seeking the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. On three occasions Jackson came to Bridgeport, demanding the mountain be moved.
“I remember sitting with him in the building over there,” Newton recalled pointing to a now-vacant area. “He was telling Geno this had to come down and Geno was crying poverty.”
By August 1991, Bridgeporters had had enough. With legal advice from a young Joe Ganim, residents created the Coalition to Rebuild Bridgeport. And Jackson’s visits to the city brought national prominence and media attention to this mountain of toppling trash.
Richard Blumenthal, at the time Connecticut’s attorney general, didn’t buy the Capozziellos’ poverty pleas and sued them on behalf of the state. The Chief State’s Attorney’s office prosecuted them, and the brothers Capozziello ended up being jailed on weekends and fined $868,000.
Meanwhile, Ganim, who was elected mayor in November 1991, and Newton negotiated a deal with the state Department of Environmental Protection to take the mountain down in 1993.
The state forked over $500,000 and the city put up another $237,000. It took D&L Enterprises of Bridgeport eight weeks to load their trucks and haul the debris to incinerators in Bridgeport and licensed dumps in Rhode Island.
Five years ago, Boot Camp Farms approached then-Mayor Bill Finch, known as the green mayor for his support of environmental projects, with a plan to build greenhouse run by military veterans on the site. That proposal appears to have died on the vine.
Now Ganim believes more realistic proposals will be made.
“We want what’s best for the community,” he said. the best proposal put forward,” said Ganim.