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A few days later she got a voice-mail message from Basilica, telling her he didn’t give his permission for such a meeting. Claire didn’t let that stop her. She knew plenty of Italian American men who thought Italian women needed their permission. She called his office back and left an equally direct message: the meeting would go on, and he was still welcome to attend.

September 19, 1997

Claire convened the NLDC’s first board meeting in a downtown building. After her rousing pep talk, the group elected officers and issued committee assignments. George Milne and Steve Percy agreed to co-chair the commercial-development committee. Tops on their to-do list was mapping out what it would take to attract a major corporation to the mill site. Milne decided he needed to see the site to get a better feel for its potential. Claire had never actually seen the site either. Percy agreed to take them to it.

Milne wasn’t quite sure what to say when he first set foot on the property. It had been described to him as exquisite, but all he saw was acres of weeds and litter. The site looked a lot like a dump. It smelled like one, too. The neighborhood contained a big sewer-treatment facility, which essentially consisted of some oversized cesspools. Under the summer heat, the plant threw off a horrific odor.

“It smelled like you were in a toilet with someone who had a terrible illness,” Claire said.

Milne observed another problem: a huge scrap-metal junkyard next door to the mill site. The place was an eyesore and no doubt had its own environmental issues with oil, grease, rubber, and other contaminants. Even the nearby historic Fort Trumbull was in shambles. Its overgrown brush and neglected buildings cast a depressing shadow on the entire landscape.

By the time Milne left, he had serious concerns about the prospects of marketing the site. “The whole setting was not particularly attractive,” he said. “It was one with enormous liabilities.”

Just the price tag for environmental remediation would scare off most corporations. Then there was the issue of indemnification. No company would settle into a site without some guarantees that it would not be liable for previous contamination. Milne saw other problems, too. “The whole environment was so unattractive that it was unlikely that any serious investor would ever come in,” he said.

Claire heard all that. But she remained convinced that a junkyard could be erased. A sewer plant could be upgraded and capped if necessary. A fort could be refurbished and even turned into a tourist attraction. And soil could be removed and replaced. To her, the bottom line was that twenty-four acres of waterfront real estate weren’t easy to come by. This land was ready to be had. It was simply too valuable to give up on.

While Milne stressed that all these costs were simply too much for a corporation to take on, Claire relied on her other strength—finding money. Jay Levin had given her reason to anticipate state assistance. “Jay said to me, ‘Ellef promised that you are forty-eight hours away from a face-to-face with the governor if you can bring a Fortune 500 company to that land,’” Claire said.

This made the prospect of state funding real. It also got Milne focused on what kind of state commitment was necessary. “My entire focus,” he explained, “was on trying to answer the question: ‘If this was the one key empty piece of land and asset that might attract major commercial development, what would have to happen to make that even plausible?’” He agreed to compile a list.

Privately, Claire hadn’t given up on the idea of Pfizer ultimately landing on the mill site. Although Milne had offered her no hope that that would happen, three things remained true: Pfizer needed land; the city had land; and the state had the power and the resources to make that land financially attractive. There was still a long way to go, but once Milne identified the needs, the governor simply had to be convinced to fill them.

Claire had more ambition than both men. She came from