Conservancy Plans ‘Merritt Parkway Trail’ Improvements in Waveny

The nonprofit organization that works to ensure that New Canaan’s most popular park continues to thrive has a plan to improve one of its major walking trails.

The southernmost trail at Waveny—running about .75 miles alongside the Merritt Parkway, from the Lapham Road overpass to the Exit 37 (now 14) southbound on/off ramps—is exposed to the state road at multiple points.

For Waveny walkers, that exposure can disrupt visitors’ enjoyment of nature by spoiling the woodland view and bringing in motor vehicle noise, according to the Waveny Park Conservancy.

“Let’s move it away, move the trail away from the highway, and get all this buffer from additional woodlands,” the Conservancy’s board chair, Fell Herdeg, told members of the Board of Selectmen last week. “And then put some of the design ethos back in there from the Olmsted Brothers. They didn’t develop straight paths. Just put nice, gentle curving paths, make it a nicer visitor experience and make it that much more isolated from the highway.”

Joined by the organization’s executive director, Michelle Crookenden, Herdeg presented to the selectmen during their Oct. 21 meeting with a vision for re-routing and otherwise improving Waveny’s “Merritt Parkway Trail.

Part of a larger master plan and several years in the making, the trail project is designed primarily to “remediate the sight and sound of the Merritt Parkway—that’s really what this is all about,” Crookenden said. That will be done not only by selectively rerouting the trail, but also by creating tasteful and effective barriers between the park and parkway, such as expanded earthen berms and new fencing, layback walls and plantings. Some of the advance work for the project has already been done.

“We want to do it in a way that’s cost effective, that is sensitive to the ecology of the landscape, and it makes this just a better experience overall, a more enriched experience overall for visitors to the park,” Crookenden continued. “And the really important piece of this is ‘ease of maintenance.’ We get that maintaining Waveny is already a major undertaking. We don’t want to make that any harder. We want to make it easier.”

The presentation was informational only, and has been made to town funding bodies and the Parks & Recreation Commission, Crookenden and Herdeg said. They sketched a timeline for the project as well as how it would be funded under the Conservancy’s successful public-private partnership with the town.

The project is to be taken in multiple phases, with a target start date of the spring or early summer of 2027, according to the Conservancy. (The existing trail would remain in place through the project so that people could continuously use that part of Waveny.) The organization is working with a specialist consultant—a preservationist landscape firm that’s familiar not only with the Olmsted Brothers but also municipalities—with offices in both Charlotte, Vt. and Norwalk, they said. Right now, the entire trail project is expected to cost $3 million to $3.5 million, with a first phase of work (toward the southwestern corner of the park) costing $1 million to $1.5 million. When the time comes, the organization would draw on its reserves, launch a capital campaign to bring in additional private donations and pursue grants. The Conservancy also has an “accrued allocation” from the town of about $682,000, officials said.

The selectmen asked whether trees would need to be removed to raise an existing Olmsted-created berm (some, yes, though more would be replanted), what kind of the new fencing is under considering (a wood fence) and whether a concrete fence would be better for soundproofing (that’s not finalized yet though concrete fencing could become prohibitively expensive).

The trail itself was not part of the original Olmsted design, Herdeg said.

“What was there was just open field,” he said. “So there were no plantings, there were no trees. It was just open space. We don’t really know when the trail was put in. There’s a theory that maybe it was actually put in at the time of the Merritt as an access road. But again, that’s a bit of guesswork.”

He added: “I think it’s important to note we think this is going to be both impactful for people using the trail, but it clearly could really be transformational for the park in general. The Olmsted Brothers put in these initial berms—we don’t know exactly when, but after the Parkway was put in place—suggesting there was a benefit to the estate, even back then, from mitigating the sound and it had an impact all the way up to the house. So by adding in additional berming, fencing, the layback wall, we think there’d be benefits up through the woods and potentially up to the meadow south of the house. So it’s not just, ‘Yes, this is for the benefit of the trail,’ but we think there are benefits more broadly across the park.”

The layback wall would be put in place near the Merritt Parkway on/off ramps at South Avenue, where “you can see right onto the highway,” Herdeg said.

“It’s basically stone on one side and then an earthen berm on the other,” he said. “It’s a common Olmsted Brothers landscape design, it’s from their toolkit. We think it’d be a really nice design element, very attractive to put here—again, about four-and-a-half feet high. But if the trail is tucked back from it a little bit, you’re going to really have limited ability to see over it and onto the Parkway. And again, it’s deflecting that sound away.”

Crookenden said such barriers are “calculated to absorb as much sound as possible.”

“Because in order for any kind of sound abatement to be effective, it needs to be continuous, it needs to be solid,” she said. “And certain design elements of that will actually create a lower decibel level and the visual screening that we’re looking for. So the earthen berms and the stone walls do that best. The piece that we’ll be fencing will be a little less effective on sound.”

The planned fencing is “our least favorite design option” in the plan, Herdeg said, “but we’re advocating putting in a section of fence that we would then soften with plantings to make it less just such a barrier type.”

“We’re really not crazy about it, but that’s really the only option available to us,” he said. “The Parkway right away comes very close to where the trail is. The trail is then restricted on either side by wetlands, so there’s really very little maneuvering that you can do without disturbing the wetlands, which of course we’re very sensitive to.”

Selectman Steve Karl said that he hears constantly from residents that the trail in question has “such a calming environment” because it’s “really close to nature” and urged the Conservancy to preserve that feel.

“So my only comment is, let’s make sure that we keep it that way where it doesn’t look too manmade,” he said, adding: “It’s really such a beautiful spot, you feel like you’re in the woods. I mean it, that’s really been the draw there forever.”