On Valentine’s Day in 2024, a small group of activists trudged through snow to a high chain-link fence surrounding hundreds of acres of woods in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In their arms they carried thousands of handwritten cards pasted onto large paper hearts: love letters to the forest that for decades had been cordoned off from the rest of the city.
One of the activists, Jhoni Ada, told the Associated Press that she remembered first catching a glimpse of the woods while passing by on the school bus. Throughout high school, she said, the trip became a daily respite, the sight of greenery soothing. Later she became an organizer with the Sierra Club’s local chapter.
“My eyes would be glued to the trees as they were whizzing by,” Ada said. “I remember just thinking: this is definitely not for public access, because I never really saw anyone walking around.”
The property, Remington Woods, was used for decades as a testing ground for munitions developed by the Union Metallic Cartridge Company and, later, Remington Arms. After Remington closed its last manufacturing facility in Bridgeport in 1986, the property underwent a decades-long cleanup effort overseen by a successor to Remington’s former parent company, DuPont de Nemours, Inc., according to the AP.
The Associated Press reported that the site is now being redeveloped as an urban forest, opening the land to a community that had watched the green expanse from behind a fence for generations. The redevelopment follows years of environmental remediation and community advocacy to transform the industrial brownfield into a public natural space.