Former munitions testing site in Connecticut redeveloped as urban forest

On Valentine’s Day in 2024, a small group of activists trudged through the snow to a high chain-link fence surrounding hundreds of acres of woods in Bridgeport. 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, said 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 the 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.

That effort, now nearing its end, is giving way to plans to preserve large portions of Remington Woods for public use — which advocates are hailing as one of the largest such conservation efforts along the heavily urbanized East Coast in nearly a century.

The outcome is one that appeared unlikely to some advocates as recently as a few years ago.

When the activists delivered their Valentine’s Day messages in 2024, developers were already seeking to turn portions of the 420-acre property into an office park, with some of the lands also set aside as open space.

That idea met with pushback from local residents and environmental groups, who wanted to see the Remington Woods’ owners, Sporting Goods Properties, alter their plans to preserve as much of the property as possible.

In October 2024, eight months after the Valentine’s Day demonstration, SPG announced a new proposal to set aside the majority of the property, up to 368 acres, as open space free from major development. The rest of the space would be leased to build Lake Success Energy Park, a solar and battery-storage facility that would be one of the largest of its kind in the region.

“There are not a lot of organizations that are willing to do this kind of pivot,” Ada said. “I want to applaud them for that. It’s definitely not an easy decision to decide conservation over development, but I do think that they made a very worthwhile decision.”

Tom Stilley, SPG’s vice president for environmental affairs, said the pivot toward a more conservation-focused development plan was ultimately a business decision.

“It was the best and highest use of the property,” Stilley said. “We continually look at all of the factors that come into play, infrastructure costs, community involvement, what the real estate market wants and demands and is looking for in any given location, and that’s how we evolved our thinking.” (SGP is a subsidiary of Corteva Agriscience, a company that was spun off as part of the 2019 split between DuPont and Dow Chemical.)

Thousands of bullets on the ground

But before the property could be made accessible to the public, it had to be cleared of leftover munitions. Some areas of soil were contaminated with lead and arsenic, which also had to be cleaned and capped.

During the cleanup effort, Stilley said workers removed of nearly 5,000 pieces of ammunition from Lake Success, a 23-acre body of water at the center of the property that was once used as a dumping ground for its owners. Some of the unexploded ordnance — ranging from bullet casings to mortar shells — was intentionally detonated on the property, in a hollowed-out section of hillside set aside for that purpose.

“We found shells that go back to the Russian Czar, because there were Russian letters on the shells,” Stilley said.

Since taking over the property in the late 1980s, Stilley said SPG has spent roughly $100 million on clean up, maintenance and security. Work is scheduled to be completed later this year on the last sections of soil remediation, he said, and some monitoring of groundwater for additional pollutants will continue for the next several years. The cleanup effort was subject to consent orders with both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, but Stilley said no public money was used in the cleanup.

Once the cleanup effort is complete, Stilley said that SPG intends to sell the property to an environmental stewardship organization that will maintain it and keep some sections open to the public through walking trails and nature-based activities. Other sections of the property will remain off limits to the public and allowed to remain wild.

The leases for the energy park will also be turned over to whatever organization takes ownership, giving them revenue to maintain the rest of the property, Stilley said.

State Rep. Joseph Gresko, D-Stratford, the deputy speaker of the Connecticut House, described Remington Woods as one of the state’s most significant conservation opportunities. The property offers a rare chance to preserve a large tract of forest while creating a public resource for residents, he said.

“I would die a happy person if this is somehow preserved,” Gresko said. “It’s an opportunity to preserve 400-plus acres of upland forest.”

Gresko said the preserve could become another “crown jewel” for Bridgeport and Stratford, giving residents access to nature just minutes from Connecticut’s largest city centers.

“People can go and experience getting out into the woods, and you would never know you’re five minutes from Main Street in the biggest city in the state,” he said.

The current inhabitants of the park include rabbits, turkeys, coyotes and a herd of deer that are managed and fed by private contractors hired by SPG. The woods, surrounded by residential development, also serves as an important waystation for thousands of migrating songbirds during the spring and fall.

Among the species that have been spotted in the park are blue-winged warblers, scarlet tanagers, rose-breasted grosbeaks and bald eagles.

“It’s impossible to overemphasize the ecological importance of this site,” said Milan Bull, the senior director of science and conservation at the Connecticut Audubon Society. “This is the largest piece of open space — urban open space — that’s left between, let’s say, Central Park and beyond Boston.”

A new energy source

Having community support for the project has also eased the regulatory pathway for the development of the energy park, which is being led by two Connecticut-based companies: Kinsley Group and TRIAD Advanced Energy Development.

David Kinsley, the chief executive for the Kinsley Group, said he and other representatives of the development group attended community meetings and spoke with neighbors to introduce them to the project and touted its benefits to region.

The solar portion of the project will be connected to the local grid and provide up to 4 megawatts of carbon-free electricity. The battery energy storage system, or BESS, will consist of an additional 250 megawatts of stored electricity that can dispatched onto the grid in four-hour increments.

On Tuesday, the developers announced that the solar portion of the project had been selected by United Illuminating through the state’s latest round of procurements for renewable energy projects, providing the project with a guaranteed customer for the next two decades. Separately, the developers also reached at agreement paying the city of Bridgeport to serve as the “virtual offtaker,” for the solar power, offsetting the energy needed to power municipal buildings.

Kinsley said the developers are waiting until the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection solicits its next round of bids for battery-storage projects before submitting the project for formal site approval. He said battery portion of the project is expected to cost upwards of $600 million and could be completed by around 2030.

If approved, the BESS facility would be the largest of its kind in Connecticut, and one of the largest in New England. Kinsley said the site also has space to build a second, 250-megawatt system depending on the results of an ongoing engineering study.

In order to mitigate disruptions during the ongoing remediation of Remington Woods, workers cleaned and buried contaminated soil on the property, limiting the need for diesel trucks to cart the soil off through surrounding neighborhoods. That landfill is now the proposed location for one of the site’s solar arrays.

“Site approval is generally one of the biggest challenges in siting these projects,” Kinsley said. “Given this location, it’s like, perfect because it’s basically a brownfield, I think it’s 1,000 feet from the closest house… It’s brilliant, the whole project is brilliant.”

During one of the community listening sessions, Ada said she spoke with a group of local middle schoolers who proposed the addition of nature-based classrooms within the park. That proposal is now under consideration as part of the the long-term conservation plan, Stilley said. In the meantime, SPG has already hosted several groups of students from Brideport and Stratford for tours of the property.

But even from beyond perimeter fence surrounding the property, Ada said students are already learning about nature through Remington Woods.

“I remember visiting a school once, and they had this billboard that their wildlife club had worked on, and they detailed all of the different species that have been in Remington Woods, and they were thinking through some of the animal tracks and some of the animal droppings that they were seeing around the fence line” she said. “That sort of being able to connect those students with with wildlife, it was very touching.”

So far, SPG has yet to settle on a name for the park, which is expected to open to the public once work is completed on the energy facilities. But Bull, of the Audubon Society, has at least one idea.

“They should call it Nirvana,” he said.

This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.