Rebuilding a bridge over Danbury’s once troubled waters

DANBURY, Conn. (AP) — When contractors rip open a section of Kennedy Avenue later this year to repair a 56-year-old bridge, they will also expose a section of the Still River with a conflicted city history.

The $3 million Kennedy Avenue bridge repair project will uncover a stretch of the Still River that suffered decades of industrial pollution during the city’s heyday as the hat capital of the world — and inflicted back-to back floods on the downtown in 1955.

“The floods were emotionally traumatic as well as physically devastating, so there was a strong push to do something concrete that would prevent this from happening again,” says Brigid Guertin, executive director of the Danbury Museum and Historical Society. “So the Still River had to be banished.”

City engineers channeled it into a deep sleeve of concrete under Main Street so it could never flood again.

Today, in order to get at the bridge and culvert, workers will have to disrupt a section of Main that has become a symbol of renewal.

Kennedy Avenue is now home to the newly build 375-unit Kennedy Flats complex, and also Kennedy Park, where City Hall has promoted lunch truck and market events to spark more street life downtown.

“It’s an important visual piece and one of the first things you see when you drive into downtown, so we’re trying to figure out if we are going to restore it as part of this project or provide all the amenities necessary to accommodate a nice park when we do our sidewalk project,” said Antonio Iadarola, Danbury’s public works director and acting city engineer. “Obviously this is the downtown and we have to keep the traffic moving - so we will be alternating traffic and doing segmented construction work.”

The project will also disrupt service on the HART bus,...