Park ‘Squatter’ Wins Fight to Stay Put

Doris Gagnon calls herself one stubborn son-of-a-gun, and there’s no disagreement from public officials.

At 4 feet 10 and 73 years of age, hers is not an imposing presence, but it is an immovable one.

You can find her living in a decrepit trailer and shack on the beach in what is identified on maps as Silver Sands State Park.

The park does not yet exist. It remains as far-off as Gagnon’s dream of moving into a $1-million shorefront home courtesy of the state.

Gagnon is the Connecticut’s most famous squatter.

A former factory worker, cook’s assistant and driver for Meals-on-Wheels, she has lived as she does for nearly 20 years--ever since the state seized her land and razed her house to make way for the park.

An American flag that once flew over her homestead is now tattered and torn--”just like my rights,” Gagnon said recently.

She believes--without legal basis, a judge has ruled--that the state owes her a new house and land equal in value to what her seized property would be worth today.

The state won an eviction order in January, but finally decided recently to let her be. Although the law was on the state’s side, public sympathy was not.

What with Gagnon having suffered from breast cancer and the park years from being developed, the state had a hard time establishing an urgent need to get her off the property.

Officials also feared that they and Gagnon might face even bigger problems if she lived in her Toyota hatchback, as she said she would if evicted.

She began battling the state in the 1960s, when it decided to carve a public park out of a portion of the Long Island Sound shoreline where Gagnon’s cottage and dozens of others stood. She lost the fight in 1971, when her property was seized, and she refused to accept the $15,000 compensation she was offered.

Gagnon stayed on. First she lived in her car. Then she moved into a trailer without electricity or running water. She has said she visits friends’ homes for creature comforts, such as showers.

Conditions at her homestead have since deteriorated, but not much else has changed. She remains a squatter on the public land with her menagerie of cats, dogs, geese, ducks and uninvited rats. The park remains mostly in the planning stage.

She’s received fan mail from around the country. A woman from Georgia wrote to compare her to the Statue of Liberty, “another lady whose spirit cannot be dimmed.”

Visitors to her ramshackle compound, which is surrounded by a chain-link fencing, chicken wire and tall marsh grass, receive a warm welcome--unless they are from the city or the state.

Ask her about her ordeal, and she takes off.

She was awarded $14,000 in a wrongful-arrest lawsuit after she used pellet gun in 1977 to ward off a man she said was attacking her and was arrested when she called the police for help.

It was one of her many run-ins with authorities--over everything from roaming dogs and parking tickets to potholes in the old dead-end road that goes by her compound. Some of them landed her in jail.

The state did not earn her gratitude when it decided to let her stay on the land. Gagnon said she believed the state wanted to avoid a showdown so it did not have to provide her with the house she still claims is owed her.

“This is another cruel tactic to keep this case going until I’m dead,” she said.