WATERBURY – Mayor Neil M. O’Leary and volunteers working to refurbish Holy Land USA hope to reopen the shuttered religious theme park later this year.
If they do so, it will be thanks in part to services donated or discounted by large contractors. This week, Empire Paving repaved a parking lot, along with access roads winding through the 17-acre park atop Pine Hill.
Jennifer Rose, secretary with a board of directors heading the Holy Land restoration, said Empire Paving is cutting roughly $80,000 from the cost. She wasn’t able to estimate the final cost to the Holy Land board of directors, however.
O&G Industries donated about 750 tons of asphalt for the project.
This week’s work will make the site more accessible, especially for the elderly and disabled, Mayor Neil M. O’Leary said
“We are really proud,” O’Leary said. “This has been a great week for Holy Land.”
Built in the 1950s at the direction of devout local attorney John Greco, Holy Land once drew tens-of-thousands of volunteers annually. The attraction featured a chapel, religious statutes, a dioramas of religious scenes, such as ancient Jerusalem.
The park closed in 1984. The roadways became cracked, pitted and infiltrated with vegetation. The statues crumbled and vandalism took a toll on the dioramas.
O’Leary and a friend, local car dealer Fritz Blasius, spearheaded a $350,000 purchase of the site in 2013 from an order of nuns. Within months, O’Leary and his supporters replaced a roughly 50-foot-tall stainless steel cross with a wider, taller, and internally illuminated cross reminiscent of an iconic cross that stood there for decades.
Worried about its structural integrity, the Religious Teachers Filippini took down the original cross in 2008 and replaced it with a simpler, stainless steel, cross.
That cross was seen by many as a poor substitute. Its replacement in 2013 with an illuminated cross donated by Pisani Steel Inc., of Naugatuck, was widely welcomed.
Today, the park is still technically off limits. Two large “no trespassing” signs at the gate warn “violators will be prosecuted.” Even so, city authorities don’t generally enforce that prohibition during daylight hours, O’Leary noted.
O’Leary said the crumbling front gate will be replaced in the coming months. He hopes to officially reopen Holy Land to the public by late this fall.
“Our goal is to have regular hours where people can park their car below and walk their dog, where people can go up there to meditate, to pray or do whatever they want to,” O’Leary said.
Industrial Riggers, a Waterbury company, also donated its services this week, moving the large stainless steel cross to the First Assembly of God Church on Thomaston Avenue. That job was worth about $3,500, Rose said.
Archbishop Leonard Blair will celebrate Mass at Holy Land on Aug. 11, an event being coordinated with the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Land board.
Organizers hope to draw thousands, according to a press release issued Friday afternoon.
The Mass is dedicated to Rev. Michael McGiviney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus and a current candidate for sainthood by the Vatican.
“We think this will be a significant religious event for the city and the state, in the spirit of the new evangelization,” the Rev. James Sullivan, pastor of Church of the Assumption in Ansonia, said, according to the release. “It will be a celebration of Holy Land and Father McGivney, who grew up in Waterbury.
Sullivan first visited Holy Land at age 6, in the company of his father and an aunt, according to the release. Sullivan’s aunt was a missionary nun visiting from Australia.
Sullivan said he hopes Holy Land will help reignite the area’s spiritual climate.
Celebrants of the Aug. 11 Mass are encouraged to arrive between 3 and 4 p.m. The Mass begins at 5:30 p.m.
Ridgefield bridge project that snarled traffic for years at last nears completion
RIDGEFIELD — Completion of a bridge replacement project that has snarled Route 35 traffic for nearly three years might finally be in sight — a year later than originally estimated and at a cost $1.5 million more than originally budgeted.
The state Department of Transportation conducted a “semifinal inspection” of the bridge on Monday, meaning the construction company’s work is essentially complete. The inspection let town officials, bridge inspectors and others suggest final touches that will be added over the next few weeks, said DOT District Engineer John Dunham.
But the major work — which limited the town’s busiest road to alternating one-way travel during much of the project — is done, Dunham said.
“There really should be very minimal disruption to people going forward,” he said. “The department appreciates everyone’s patience during the construction of this project, and we recognize the challenges faced by the traveling public as we reconstructed the bridge.”Renovation of the bridge, which crosses Ridgefield Brook near the Fox Hill Condos, began in August 2015 and was expected to end by May 2017. A routine inspection had added the bridge to a list for replacement due to its age and substandard condition.
But the discovery during the early phases of work of an unknown sewer line set back the schedule and added to the final cost. Dunham said the line wasn’t marked on maps of the area — not unusual for older utility lines.
The problem was that the line was in the way of the new bridge abutments and had to be completely relocated to continue the work. That brought the total cost of the project to $3.9 million.
“We would have had to pay for it one way or another,” Dunham said, “but if we’d known it was there we probably would have worked the schedule a little differently so it didn’t delay things. That certainly added time, no doubt about that.”
The alternating traffic created long back-ups as drivers traveled to and from the center of town.
Barbara Nevins, who owns Southwest Cafe a quarter-mile from the bridge, said it would sometimes take 20 minutes to get to work from her home a mile away. She hopes things will calm down now that the major work is done.
“We’re just out right in front of it, so it’s been very busy,” Nevins said. “It’s not going to change until its (completely) done, so we have to take it in stride and hopefully things will get better.”
Nevins and the owner of another nearby shop, Willy Nicolini of Jersey Mike’s, said it is difficult to tell whether the construction adversely affected their business.Nicolini guessed it didn’t because Jersey Mike’s numbers are up this year. He added that Route 35 often has traffic even without construction, so he doesn’t blame the project for causing delays.
“It seemed like there were days when traffic was bad and it was a little slower, but some days there was no construction over here and there’s still a lot of traffic,” he said.
The bridge replacement was also brought up during discussions of other construction projects in town. Town officials asked that a bridge replacement on Route 7 last summer, which rerouted traffic through Route 35, be postponed until the Route 35 project was done.
State officials ended up moving ahead with the Route 7 project, but scheduled the construction for different periods during the week from the Route 35 wor The Route 35 project also seemed to make residents wary of new projects during a recent meeting about DOT’s plans to renovate Ridgefield’s Main Street. “After the debacle up by the bridge, why should we feel confident the state could do any better on Main Street?” one Main Street business owner said during the meeting.
Dunham said the department has been working closely with the town to avoid letting the Main Street project disrupt traffic as much as it did on Route 35. The Main Street renovation, which is still in the planning stages, should run more smoothly because it is less complicated than a bridge replacement, he said.
“We’re working with the first selectman’s office directly to see what design changes we can make so we don’t have the interruptions that we had on that previous job,” he said. “We do recognize that there was an impact and we certainly don’t want that to happen for the next project.”
Dunham added that construction on the Main Street project likely can be done at night to avoid stalling traffic, while the Route 35 bridge’s proximity to the Fox Hill Condos made it difficult to do work outside daylight hours.
Fourth lane on Gold Star Bridge, Bridge Street on-ramp to reopen by weekend
Kimberly Drelich
The state Department of Transportation said it's on schedule to both reopen the Bridge Street on-ramp and add an additional travel lane on Interstate 95 southbound across the Gold Star Memorial Bridge prior to the Memorial Day weekend.
The DOT has an ongoing rehabilitation project for the southbound side of the bridge.
The change for the new lane configuration, which will provide four travel lanes, will occur over the week. Temporary lane closures after 8 p.m. are expected through Thursday, according to Project Engineer Keith Schoppe.
By the end the week, the DOT expects all of the barrier curbs will be relocated, the roadway re-striped and the Bridge Street on-ramp reopened.
On Monday night, the contractor will begin relocating the temporary concrete barrier curbs, which are expected to be in place by the end of Wednesday night's shift, Schoppe said. The next steps — line striping and the ramp reopening — are scheduled for Thursday night into Friday morning.
The DOT provided the following details on the new lane configuration:
• The Route 184 (Gold Star Highway) on-ramp will begin as a dedicated lane and continue as the left-most through lane on I-95.
• The added right-most lane will begin as a dedicated lane for the Bridge Street on-ramp and shall remain as a dedicated exit lane at Exit 84 to Route 32 and downtown New London.
• The pavement markings will be reconfigured to provide four lanes of traffic across the bridge. Through traffic will keep to the left three lanes.
• The work zone will be separated from the road with temporary concrete barrier curbs.
"We expect that adding the fourth lane across the bridge will significantly improve traffic flow across the bridge and facilitate the smooth flow of I-95 southbound traffic through the work zone," Schoppe said. "In addition, reopening the Bridge Street on-ramp should alleviate some of the congestion on secondary state and local roads."