VIEW FROM THE GREEN: Learning to Live with the Great Wall
By Joe Kelly
Major construction of the new retaining wall on Route 44 is nearing completion. Work was expected to be suspended during the cold weather, but the contractor now plans to work through December and, weather permitting, intends to fit in as many workdays as possible during the winter.
Various finishing touches won’t get done until next April when warmer weather returns, but it’s clear this $38 million project has reached a turning point. Now comes what may be the hardest part: learning to live with it. For better or worse, the wall has already become a local landmark. Along with the Alfa Romeo repair shop, the recently refurbished World War I Memorial and the pink stucco of the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, the wall helps define one’s first impression of Norfolk when coming from the west.
It’s not the town’s tallest manmade structure. In the absence of precise measurements, it would appear that at about 125 feet, the spire of the United Church of Christ meeting house enjoys that distinction. But at 42 feet at its tallest point, the Route 44 wall gives other Norfolk landmarks including the Catholic church, Battell Chapel, the Royal Arcanum building and the stone tower atop Haystack Mountain a run for their money.
Ask around town for reactions to the wall and you’ll quickly find they run the gamut. With a nod to China, some have taken to calling it Norfolk’s Great Wall. Fair enough in terms of height, but not length. China’s Great Wall stretches thousands of miles while the total extent of Norfolk’s Route 44 wall is not even half a mile. Others liken the wall to what greets travelers approaching the famous hill towns of Italy or southern France where huge stone walls dating back hundreds of years once enabled locals to man the ramparts against invading armies, plague, infidels and worse. Some say it resembles the exterior of a 19th-century penitentiary.
Whatever mental associations it conjures, Norfolk’s new wall addresses an internal, not an external threat. Because the hillside coming down from Norfolk’s historic Center Cemetery is so steep, the old wall that once held it back (15 feet high and dry laid) was on the verge of complete collapse. The narrow right-of-way between the hillside and the Blackberry River left no easy way to make the slope less steep. Shaving back the hill would have meant cutting into the cemetery. Easing the slope by extending the base would have required pushing Route 44 closer to the river, demolishing multiple homes and businesses in the process. So a very tall, vertical, engineered concrete wall emerged as the most practical option. It may be the tallest highway retaining wall of its kind in the state. Eva Zymaris, a public information officer for the Connecticut Department of Transportation (DOT), could find only four other engineered walls on that scale in DOT’s inventory. All were shorter.
The circumstances that produced Norfolk’s wall are not unusual. And considering what has been built elsewhere, Norfolk might consider itself lucky. Steubenville, Ohio, a small town (population 18,000) found itself with a collapsing hillside overlooking both a state highway and the Ohio River. As in Norfolk, the available right-of-way was so narrow it left little choice but to hold back the hillside using a concrete retaining wall. That wall ended up being over 13 stories high, an instant landmark for Steubenville and a definite candidate for the Guiness Book of World Records in the category of highway retaining walls (if there was such a thing).
The finishing touches that will be applied next spring to Norfolk’s wall may help soften its visual impact. A concrete coping layer will be added at the top, along with a four-foot-high decorative iron fence. The temporary roadway behind the wall will be filled in and function as a drainage swale. The entire area above the wall up to the cemetery will be planted with some 2,000 trees and shrubs. As many have noticed, the concrete facing of the wall took on an orange/yellowish col-oring during construction. That’s temporary, according to Zymaris. It will go away once the entire surface is power washed and sealed with a coating of variable shades of grey. Finally, the roadway through the construction site will be repaved with a wider, five-foot shoulder in both directions. The plan is for everything to be done by the summer.
The DOT intends to hold a ceremony celebrating Norfolk’s wall and there will be much to applaud. Travelers through Norfolk are no longer threatened by a collapsing hillside. Norfolk’s historic cemetery has been protect-ed. The wider shoulders make the roadway safer. The project is coming in essentially on or under budget. And assuming a completion by next summer, a job that was originally expected to take five years will be over and done in under three. All good news. Now all that’s left is to accept a 42-foot-high concrete wall as a permanent, defining feature of Norfolk. For many, that may take a while.