Courtney Fulilove, an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University in Middletown, opens her laptop as her students crowd around her to see a video clip featuring a former Manresa Island power plant worker.
The laptop is the only machine cutting through the silence inside a once bustling power plant on Manresa Island in Norwalk.
Fullilove said it’s a world of a difference from what workers experienced.
“It’s hard to imagine now, but when this plant was running, it would have been deafening,” Fullilove said.
Fulilove and her students tour the rest of the plant, but it's more than a field trip, they’re putting together an archive about the island, it’s called The Manresa Island History Project.
They’re busy at work, interviewing former power plant workers and people who lived and worked in and around the island over the last few decades.
Fulilove said the project is part of a larger initiative which involves turning the island into a 125-acre public park and coastal habitat. The oral history project will give visitors historical context about the transformation the island has seen throughout the decades.
Fulilove said speaking with former plant workers and residents, helps illuminate how locals related to the plant in nuanced ways.
Many people protested against the construction of the plant in the 1960s and there were workers who took immense personal pride in the plant, as their labor helped generate electricity to the surrounding area.
The plant started out as a coal plant before being switched over to oil, and it attracted negative attention from state environmentalists who referred to it as part of the “filthy five,” five power plants throughout Connecticut criticized for their excessive smog levels.
The workers in some of the interviews resented the moniker. One of Fulilove’s students, Ben Lipper, believes listening to how the workers kept the plant as clean as possible suddenly made a historic controversy less abstract and more human.
“I can kind of imagine how, because the work was so difficult and taxing, and they're doing all this work to try to make the power and kind of keep it clean, you know, as they as they could at the time, I can imagine how, like hearing the filthy five moniker was so infuriating,” Lipper said.
Manresa Island Corp.Executive Director, Jessica Vonashek said the project will also include disused industrial equipment and artifacts.
“We sort of have this idea of an artifact graveyard where it's sort of like all of these pieces will live in this space on the site,” Vonashek said.
Tours of the plant are currently open to the public. Photographers interested in ruin photography are invited to take photos as well before the plant is scheduled to become a community hub, with an art installation by around 2032.
Hearing the battles over the plant, from its construction to its eventual shuttering in 2013 after it was flooded by Superstorm Sandy, also makes the new coastal habitat project more impressive, according to Fulililove.
She said having those accounts of how it came to be, will help residents understand how residents interacted with the local environment on the island, in ways that promote a more nuanced understanding of the past.
She referred to a community meeting where someone spoke nostalgically about the plant, using it as a guide when returning home from the Long Island Sound.
“For a young girl, it was a feature of the environment that she incorporated into her imagination and into her sense of where her home was. And I found that to be sort of magical,” Fulilove said.
