Reclaiming Healy Park: A symbol of renewal and a reckoning with homelessness in Concord

On a warm fall day in 2003, what had once been a dumping ground for coal byproduct along the Merrimack River in Concord was opened to the public as a city park.

Filling a teardrop shaped “wooded meadow” between Interstate 93 and the river, the only trace of what the land had once been was a faint, “oily, olfactory ghost” that wafted up from the mud along the banks, per a Monitor report.

Celebrating the cleanup not just of the land, then dotted with wildflowers and shaded by Maple trees, but of the river running alongside it, the city named the new park in memory of William A. Healy. A city resident for decades, Healy was also a state employee for 50 years, spending 40 of them guiding the state’s water pollution abatement efforts. That the river today is a place where people fish, swim and slice through the water on crew sculls is in large part thanks to Bill Healy.

“The park is a reminder to us,” Bill’s son, John Healy, said at the dedication, “and subsequent generations, that we need to keep one eye forward to the future and one eye on the past. We can never let our natural resources deteriorate and fall from our grasp.”

It was never the most picturesque place for a park: with both the railroad and, later, the highway separating it from more frequented parts of the south end, there was a reason it had been chosen as a dumping ground back in the day.

But that made its namesake all the more fitting: Healy Park symbolized that everything from the shaded, overlooked corners of the city to the wide, slow-moving river that severs it in two could be made new, even nice, with investment.

Today, the mile-long trail that runs through the park is lined every dozen yards or so with collapsed tents and shopping carts. They overflow with plastic food containers, empty cans, discarded propane tanks, shredded couch stuffing, mud-caked jeans, flannel shirts and stray, lace-less shoes. In one cart, wet ash from an old fire rusts the bars. Beside a spent whipped cream can, an empty bottle of adult multivitamins. At the bend where the path starts to fold back on itself is a larger camp, with wooden pallets set vertically as a gate, complete with a no trespassing sign.

Along the trail, the wildflowers have long been choked out by thickets of invasive green vines that shroud views of the river from the trail and stretch into the walkway. The mosquitoes cluster so densely that they can be inhaled. Under the Manchester Street bridge, at the mouth of the park, the ground is caked in mud from the recently receded spring floods. A sleeping bag hangs from the chain-link caging that runs under the bridge’s belly.

At some point this summer, the city will begin using the roughly $200,000 it set aside in the 2026 budget to clear out Healy Park and return it to its pleasant, if imperfect, condition as a scenic place for a walk. But concerns about where the roughly one dozen people currently living there will go have sparked a conversation in the city about creating transitional, temporary housing options, like a sanctioned encampment.

Most of the camp sites in the park have been abandoned and picked through, according to Concord Police, as people have moved elsewhere or into housing.

Evan Leary lived in Healy park for a few months last fall.

It was dirty, loud — especially when the trees grew bare and there was nothing to muffle the roar of highway traffic — and brutal.

On more than one occasion, he woke in the middle of the night, frozen, then accidentally set his tent aflame as his numbed hands tried to restart a fire.

It also held some dark sense of protection.

“There’s a little bit of sense of community, and there’s a little bit of sense of safety there,” Leary said. Safety, that is, from the public eye. “It was just a constant reminder that I was essentially looked upon as discarded trash. I felt like I was trash. And so this was the only place I could go.”

Leary is a 2007 graduate of Concord High School. He was captain of the baseball and hockey teams and went on to play baseball at Colby Sawyer College, then pursued a career in financial planning. He was married. He was a Rotarian.

Living in Manchester at the time, it was his addiction, first to alcohol then harder drugs, that put him outside.

“My world basically came crashing down on me,” he said. Including stints living in his car or in a hotel, he was unhoused for two years. He came back to Concord last July.

Leary’s path out of Healy Park and into rehab, then sober living, came by reaching a “pain threshold,” he said.

When he was arrested on multiple outstanding warrants in December, he opted to go to rehab rather than post bail. It wasn’t something he could have been convinced into, he said, he chose it for himself.

“You can’t tell someone who is an addict what to do,” he said. “It’s just guiding them towards, you know, ‘there are options for rehab if you ever want them,’ and leaving it at that. People will eventually hit a pain threshold.”

To Leary, Concord is doing a lot of things right: he spoke highly of city police and the Friendly Kitchen. But he emphasized that there have to be more resources. Namely, more outreach workers, more access to therapists and mental healthcare, more shelter space.

While court intervention was successful for Leary, he doesn’t think that’s a model for everyone in his situation.

“That can’t be the only thing. That is the most expensive way I’ve ever seen of trying to get someone sober,” he said. “Rather than having all your taxes get drained by the court system and by fines that never get paid, by court dates that never get gone to, maybe try and have a softer, gentler way to get people into a more hopeful situation for themselves.”

John Healy, now mostly retired and living in Florida, has kept every record he was ever sent about the park: the plaques, the letters of endorsement, the emails explaining apologetically why the permitting had been delayed.

He’s disappointed that it’s in the shape it’s in and was glad to hear that the city had set aside money to clean out and refresh it.

He also knows a clean out isn’t that simple.

“I applaud the effort. I really do…but they’re going to be back in an hour and a half. That’s the problem I see,” he said. “The problem is you need the cure, you know? You’ve got to go back to the beginning and try and solve that problem.”

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.