By SHAWN R. BEALS
Its streets were lined with stores, a post office, a Chinese laundry, markets, all crowded into handsome brick-and-wood buildings just spitting distance from the sprawling Bigelow mills beside the Connecticut River..
During shift changes and on weekends, those streets teemed with millworkers and their families. They didn’t need to go to Hartford or Springfield for anything. Everything was in Thompsonville.
But those were the glory days, between the world wars, when Thompsonville was really all there was of Enfield, rather than Enfield’s sore thumb. In the 1950s, the mills slowed; in 1971, they closed. People left. Urban renewal knocked down the buildings, taking Thompsonville’s character along with them.
Now, a cluster of determined people is trying to write a new chapter about the old village.
A new Thompsonville, they say, could be a great place to raise a family. Its crime rate would be negligible, small businesses would prosper and properties would look spiffy, rather than rundown.
And — this is a big one — if Thompsonville residents or workers needed to travel to nearby cities, they would hop on a train at the station near the Bigelow apartment complex. Work and money have already been devoted to building a bus depot near Bigelow. If all goes as planned, by 2014, that center would become a rail center as well, allowing residents and workers to get on one of the state’s planned New Haven to Springfield trains.
Some people are extremely optimistic.
“There has been more of a focus and more action in the last year than we’ve seen for many years before,” said Carl Sferrazza, Enfield’s police chief.
As a child growing up there, as a patrolman, as the department’s top officer and as a promoter of the town’s Italian heritage with the Mount Carmel Society, Sferrazza has seen the best and worst of Thompsonville.
His personal interest in bringing pride back to his boyhood streets is as strong as his professional interest in working with other officials to clean them up.
“There’s always been an effort to revitalize the place, said Peter Bryanton, Enfield’s director of community development. “Right now there is a real political backing like never before.”
A Drug Plague
On a late winter drive along Pearl Street, in the heart of Thompsonville, a midday drug deal was apparently going on. Two young men on a street corner, looking quickly around, each shoved a hand into bulky coats and then shook hands.
Drugs are at the root of all of Thompsonville’s problems, Sferrazza said, especially heroin which, at $3 to $5 a bag, is coming in from Springfield and Hartford. And there’s always crack, he added, just as addictive and just as cheap.
But drugs are just one piece of an intricate weave of problems.
Thompsonville has little industry to keep residents employed. Its foreclosure rate is high. Blighted properties are rampant.
And, according to the 2000 Census, the village’s owner-occupancy rate, at about 20 percent, is very low, although officials say it may have risen as a result of recent local and state initiatives to encourage home ownership.
But rundown properties, police sirens and vacant buildings continue to be part of everyday life for Thompsonville’s 7,800 or so residents.
Although it makes up only about two of Enfield’s 33 square miles, Thompsonville is responsible for about a third of all arrests in town, a third of all drug arrests and a third of all violent crimes, which includes assaults and robberies.
Sferrazza said the arrest numbers have remained stable from year to year as a whole, in part because police have progressively increased their presence in Thompsonville and are catching as many people committing crimes as they can.
“Arrests in these areas are disproportionate to the rest of the community,” Sferrazza said last week. “But, despite these numbers, there are so many good people in the village, it’s a minority of individuals that are breaking the law down there.”
Optimism about Thompsonville’s future isn’t shared by many of the village’s residents.
During a recent walk down some of the area’s most troubled streets, such as Pleasant and Church, a number of residents readily admitted that Thompsonville is troubled — that drugs are rampant and crime is overwhelming — and they maintain that the town doesn’t seem to care unless there’s an election coming up.
“People that own the houses don’t clean up the property,” said Ray Sukhram, whose family has owned a home on Church Street for the past 10 years. “Nobody wants to buy the houses here. The town hall, Brainard Road, they all have new sidewalks. They should do something with Church Street.”
Dave Campbell, who has rented on Church Street for five years, agreed. “Landlords don’t care who they’re renting to as long as they’ve got the money. More needs to be done. We need to get the landlords to not become apathetic.”
Voices For Thompsonville
Carrie Robinson, president of Voices for Thompsonville, has lived in the village on and off for 12 years.
She was first struck by the depth of Enfield’s distrust of the village when her daughter invited a friend for a sleepover. The girl’s mother withdrew her permission, though, once she learned where Robinson lives.
But Robinson said she can see the village’s image changing, little by little. A resident sent her an e-mail telling her how quickly the police dispersed a crowd that regularly gathered outside her house.
“It brought a tear to my eye,” she said, to see that the efforts of Voices and town officials seem to be making a difference.
A major challenge, she said, is changing the perception of Thompsonville as a drug-riddled, dirty and unsafe neighborhood to one where good people live with their families.
Since the group formed in June 2008, members of Voices for Thompsonville have been getting involved in events such as the area’s July 4 celebration, and they’ve been creating their own events like the Miss Thompsonville pageant and a “clean sweep” beautification effort. The group meets the third Thursday of every month, and they do periodic walks to meet people and spread their name.
“We want to tell people that we’re not going away, we’re here and we’re going to keep fighting. We’d love for them to jump on the wagon,” Robinson said. “We don’t need volunteers, we just need the community’s support. One of the reasons the group was created was to ensure that everybody had a voice.”
Enfield Mayor Scott Kaupin attributes some of the recent actions by town officials to “a realization that the revitalization of Thompsonville is key to the future success and growth of the town.”
“They get a lot of the credit,” Kaupin said of Voices for Thompsonville. “Them working with the town makes the resources go a lot farther.”
Juan Vargas, who now lives outside of Thompsonville, returns often to see his family. Recently, while cutting his mother-in-law’s lawn on Alden Avenue, he said he noticed progress.
“The neighborhood has been picking up,” he said. “People are putting money into their properties.
“I left and came back and it changed, and now it’s changing again. Things have gotten a lot better compared to what I’ve seen.”
Progress
One project, one new business at a time, things are happening.
The project that could really spark development is a regional rail and bus hub that would give people in the area a reason to go to Thompsonville.
Town officials have been working toward a transit center for the past several years. They learned in September that Enfield could receive up to $1 million in federal stimulus money to help pay for it. The center eventually would offer bus and rail service that would link up with a massive New Haven-to-Springfield rail project in the works at the state level.
A hope for the future: The project could stimulate the development of amenities for passengers and visitors, such as stores and coffee shops.
Bryanton, Enfield’s community development chief, and other town officials are spending a lot of energy working to get bus routes from Thompsonville in place by 2011 or 2012, then get train service on line whenever the state gets the ambitious commuter rail system up and running.
“Bigelow would no longer be an island by itself as an apartment complex,” Kaupin said. “You can envision a natural extension up the street to North Main Street. It would extend back into the area that used to have a lot of the town’s economic activity.”
But there’s a lot more going on besides work toward the transit center.
Bryanton’s office has set up grant and loan programs for first-time home buyers, housing rehabilitation loans, facade improvements, tax deferral and small business development. All are intended to encourage business growth and help home owners in Thompsonville. In fact, Bryanton’s office is on High Street in Thompsonville, rather than in town hall.
He said the facade improvement program, which gives $2,000 grants and can offer as much as $20,000 in loans, has been used by at least 30 businesses so far, and almost 30 people have used the first-time home buyer program since it began in 2004.
The housing rehabilitation option has been running for several decades and has helped a few hundred property owners, Bryanton said.
Add those to a nearly completed bike path across the Connecticut River from Suffield and Windsor Locks, sprucing up Freshwater Pond and a host of other projects, and it looks like Enfield is making headway.
“It’s going to take some desire and some passion and a lot of hard work. It’s a lot of little things that will turn a community around,” Bryanton said.
“Thompsonville will probably never be what it was before. We don’t have a mill, we don’t have the same demographics. We have to start looking at what Thompsonville can be.”
Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant
