City park renovations offers better protection

Avery Bleichfeld

When Allison Perlman, a project manager at the Boston Department of Parks and Recreation, first walked out to Moakley Park in South Boston there were “literally two people” using the space. It was a Tuesday afternoon.

The small number of visitors isn’t strange. The sports fields flood after rainstorms, busy roads isolate the space and rising sea-levels threaten the coastal park.

A city plan aims to renovate the park in order to make it more accessible and more diverse in the activities it offers. The plan also will use the park as a major step in making the shoreline of the city more resilient to the effects of the changing climate. Perlman is managing the Moakley Park project.

“It’s a really opportunity to think about how do we provide better recreation, better community spaces, but also add in this climate resiliency piece,” Perlman said, “making sure that we understand that one doesn’t compete with the other but actually benefits the other in creating these really dynamic and high performance landscapes that we’re really interested in building.”

The Moakley Park Vision Plan also allows for a greater connectivity to the waterfront, said Amy Whitesides, studio director at Stoss Landscape Urbanism, the consultant firm for the project.

“Boston is a waterfront city that really hasn’t faced the water and hasn’t really embraced the water in most places, and this is really kind of the first opportunity for a really large waterfront park in Boston that can really be a world-class park,” Whitesides said.

Central to the re-design of the park is a berm, a stretch of raised land, that will serve as a method of flood protection. Whitesides said that the berm will not be limited to keeping water out and that it is “really integrated into all the park.”

“It’s serving the function of creating a little bit more spatial diversity of where the athletic fields are and then it’s creating connections between the neighborhood and the waterfront,” Whitesides said.

The plan also includes the eventual closure of Day Boulevard, which separates the park from the beach and decreases accessibility to the waterfront. Officials worry that over time the road will become more and more impacted by coastal flooding.

“The idea [is] that actually, as [increased flooding] happens, using that as an opportunity to connect the park and the waterfront is how we’ve been approaching that,” Whitesides said. “Ultimately, Day Boulevard [...] would be too expensive to keep [...] open, and so [we’re looking at] shutting that down, in the long-term, so that it really becomes more of a community path and a connector that’s really linking the [park and beach].”

The plan is in early stages. An adaptable vision plan was announced at a community meeting on March 28, with the project divided into stages. The first stage is comprised of work on a sport court complex.

Later stages will remain flexible. Perlman said she anticipates changes based on where the berm is constructed, permitting for the project and community response.

“As we move forward, thinking about the community and their changing needs as this area will always be anchored by the low income housing, which is a real benefit to us, but it also has a lot of development that’s about to happen in the next ten years or two, so thinking about how do we continue to go back to the community and make sure that we’re meeting their needs,” Perlman said.

Efforts to improve resiliency may not stay within the physical footprint of the park. Whitesides said they are considering man-made breakwaters, mimicking the role the Harbor Islands play in protecting the coastline, as an option to protect a section of shore that is less protected.

The plan is part of the city-wide Climate Ready Boston initiative, which operates in five neighborhoods around the city—East Boston and Chelsea, Charlestown, Downtown Boston, South Boston and Dorchester—as well as in Moakley Park.

Climate Ready Boston Coordinator Alisha Pegan, said the park is included with the broader neighborhood plans because of the impact it, as a specific area, can have.

“It’s so large and it poses a really unique opportunity for the city,” Pegan said. “I don’t think that there are any similar spaces along the shoreline—maybe potentially the marsh spaces in East Boston.”

The Climate Ready Boston initiative works in parks and green spaces along the shoreline of Boston to implement nature-based solutions, called green infrastructure, where possible. Where it’s impossible to use green infrastructure, the plan will make use of grey infrastructure—structures like seawalls or raised paths of transit made out of cement or other “grey” materials—to complete the protection.

The initiative also prioritizes equity in the work to protect the city.

“One of the lenses we look through in Climate Ready Boston is understanding who are the vulnerable populations and how are we supporting them?” Pegan said. “With these solutions of creating a park system in Boston, I think it’s important for us to note which areas we’re prioritizing and how many people does that help, and who are those people that helps them.”

She said Moakley Park, with its proximity to three housing developments as well as public schools and community centers, is an example of that lens.

Ultimately, however, the Moakley Park Vision Plan is also about renovating a space for the community to be.

“I think the biggest piece [of the project] isn’t actually an element of it, but if I get out there, let’s say 10 years down the line, and everything is implemented, and it’s just packed from morning to night, that will be a huge success,” Perlman said.