I saw plastic-sleeved paper signs, in both English and Spanish, forbidding encampment by order of the West Haven police. Being alone is by itself a vulnerability, but being left alone is the expectation of people who come to spend the night along Marginal Drive. In 2013, the Register reported the accidental and unwitnessed death of a homeless man named Raymond Beauchesne at his campfire on the river side of Marginal Drive. As reported in the New Haven Register, the largest of these was broken up by New Haven and West Haven police in 2010, having come to be associated with accumulated misdemeanors both inside and outside its circle. Tent encampments of the homeless are known to spring up in the woods nearby. Understandably, then, it’s become a place where hazards and heartbreaks of human marginalization play out.
It’s inside the West Haven border, but also inside a New Haven park. Contributing to that feeling was the neither-here-nor-there-ness of Marginal Drive, its gradual returning to nature, with grass poking through its ruts and one of its light posts being pulled backward by a cloak of vines. I pedaled through it but mentally coasted, lulled by the greenery on both sides.
The peculiar magic of a fully paved road with no cars and no buildings-for three quarters of its length, anyway-is that it doesn’t feel like it counts toward the total length of your trip. There’s a point here where the river and the lagoon are only separated by the drive and a little bit of embankment, and you can see both of them, one flowing, the other waiting. Then emerged a pale, still and unexpected body of water called Horseshoe Lagoon. In that direction, I first saw the tidy lines of headstones in St. Most of the visible water is, in fact, on the right. There are dubious breaks, partial views that hint at wide open space, a couple crude paths to the water’s edge but none wide enough to tote a boat through. I expected to see the river on my left when I first bicycled in, but the intervening strip of land is dense with trees and underbrush. The map also shows how closely married Marginal Drive is to the West River. Suddenly, here’s a bike-friendly link between Westville and Allingtown. But search for a bicycle route from Westville to the West Haven shore and Marginal Drive lights up like invisible ink in a Hardy Boys mystery. It’s skinnier than Yale Avenue and looks like nothing more than the border of adjacent West River Memorial Park. Marginal Drive hides well even on a Google map.
But if you press for a walk signal and roll through the pedestrian gap beside the gate, you’ll enter what is actually the widened mouth of an unmarked road named Marginal Drive. If you’re new and unsuspecting, you turn east or west or around. Beyond is an unpromising lot likely formed by the turn radii of dump trucks, with a levee of mulch lining one end and piles of wood and slag at the other. From start to finish, you’ve pedaled all the way into West Haven without much resistance.īut then, at the end of Yale Avenue, you come face to face-across four lanes of Route 34, still doing its best to be an expressway-with a red iron gate and a “Do Not Enter” sign. You’ve got Edgewood’s woods at your shoulder, followed by the monumental concrete structures of the Yale Bowl and the Connecticut Tennis Center. C ycling south from the top of Yale Avenue takes advantage of one of the nicer designated bike routes in New Haven.