Q & A with John St. Hilaire
The Trailblazer

By Dan J. Szczesny
HippoPress.com
Q & A with

John St. Hilaire is so busy trying to build trails, he rarely has time to walk on them.

The 44-year-old marketing consultant is a powerful grassroots voice for green space in the city, and the green space he likes the most used to be traveled by boxcars. For the past three years, the chair of the Queen City Trails Alliance has cajoled, convinced, begged and argued for turning the old Manchester to Lawrence Branch rail bed into a pedestrian trail.

And it's working. His group landed a $905,000 federal grant for the work, which will begin later this month. But he's only just begun. The Manchester section of that trail is part of a larger 40-mile stretch, from Salem to Concord. Now he sits on a state committee that's looking into turning the whole thing into a linear green space.

St. Hilaire, who lives on the south side just minutes from the trail he's helping to build, talked with HippoPress about the benefits of trails, making time to use them and how they can make the city a better place to live.

Did your love of the outdoors come from your childhood?

Well, I lived in Pinardville, but was born in France. My father was in the service in France. I went to school at Goffstown High School. … As kids growing up, we had access to the railroad tracks. The bed on the West Side they are working on now (the Piscataquog Trail) was an active rail line when I was a kid. We used to ride our bikes along those tracks all the time to go swimming in the river.

In my adult life, I've been involved with youth for the past 13 or 14 years, South Soccer and South Little League Baseball. One thing I noticed with my own kids is that there is no place they can go. You can't roller skate, there are no sidewalks and traffic is just horrendous. So that's where my thought process was when I became involved with rails-to-trails.

Why did you become involved?

It was more a reactive than a proactive stance. They were going to develop the vacant rail bed, the Manchester to Lawrence line, into a roadway and that would have been a horrendous thing for residents of the South End of Manchester. We came out with a grassroots organization to stop the building of a roadway and that led into the positive stance of this needing to be a trail. That's how the organization got started.

Once you start looking at it, the rail bed is a natural division line between the south end of Manchester's residential and commercial properties. It goes past one of largest natural resources, Nutts Pond, and over Cohas Brook before it gets to the airport. It's a hundred feet wide.

There is a national movement to turn rails to trails.

It is. In fact, the guy that leads it for the eastern region is an old railman. … One of his favorite sayings is that if it can't be rail it must be trail. These beds offer, at a minimum, a 66-foot right of way. They are built to withstand any type of weather. Drainage has already been engineered in. Because a lot of towns were built around the railroads, these rail beds, for the most part, go right through the heart of most cities and towns. They are straight, they are flat and just the rail bed itself is 10 feet wide. It's already there. Underneath the tracks, it's built like a road. They did most of the work for us. It's a national treasure.

How was Queen City Trails Alliance formed?

Once we stopped the road from being manufactured, we decided that as a group we needed to keep this going and manage this so it becomes a resource that's available for all residents. So we formed a group, probably 20 to 30 of us started working on it. Like all groups, there are nonactive members. It boiled down to about six people that just kept working on it. Then there are other people, who whenever we need things, they are a phone call away. In our core members we have an engineer, a bike enthusiast and a physics teacher at Memorial.

Do you hike or use the trails?

I don't have much time for hiking anymore. I do walk for exercise and ride whenever I can. Right now my life is pretty busy. We're right at the cusp of groundbreaking on the trail. My kids have used that rail bed, though, crossed it to go from my house to K-Mart and Toys-R-Us. They used it to get to the ball field, so we've been walking the trail for quite some time.

What's your favorite spot on the trail?

Nutts Pond is one of my favorite places. The trail is so wide when you get around Nutts Pond, then there are a lot of little trails that run through the woods. I also love the trestle over Big Cohas Brook. The view is phenomenal.

Are there any safety concerns on the trail?

Right now the trail is only partially developed and used. So, use the buddy system, two or three people. But it's much safer on that trail than it is walking on the side of the streets. Once the trail is fully built, then the police will travel it more, there will be more foot traffic and pedestrian traffic. Have a cell phone with you, but the trail itself is very, very safe, especially the part from Perimeter to South Beech streets. That section is not grown in. It's wide open.

What are the benefits of having urban trails?

They bring back a link that is now gone. When they used to build houses, they used to build sidewalks, and porches on the sides of the houses. Now we are a motorized society. There are no more sidewalks. You have to get in a car, which isolates you, and you get no exercise. People get mad now because they can't park right out in front…. By creating this trail, we are starting to promote exercise. I'm not a small person. I'm a fairly big guy, I need the exercise…. And it's going to connect us, connect us to each other and to all the businesses on South Willow Street.

Dan J. Szczesny can be reached at: hippo@hippopress.com