A sign touts a sunnier Jerry’s Pond for North Cambridge during Friday’s chill. (Photo: Marc Levy)

A plan to transform the fenced-in Jerry’s Pond and its Rindge Avenue border into a green space and public amenity suffered a setback Monday in a Cambridge City Council vote, but advocates say the proposal is not defeated. They urge residents to speak up at its next step: a Conservation Commission hearing this month when developer IQHQ presents its own, more modest plan.

“They don’t have permits,” said Eric Grunebaum, of the group the Friends of Jerry’s Pond, referring on Wednesday to IQHQ. “I don’t think this is the end for our proposal, although it’s certainly late in the game.”

In a letter published the same day, other group leaders and city councillors said the lack of investment from the city in enhancing the IQHQ proposal stands in “stark contrast” with the money put into amenities for higher-income areas and “raises questions about who and what we prioritize in our city.” They urge residents to contact officials and speak at the commission hearing to support the Friends’ plan.

The most recent version of what IQHQ seeks to do called for the planting of about 29 trees, the extension of the sidewalk into a multiuse path, a Mass Audubon eco-center and construction of a boardwalk hanging over the pond’s edge. It would cost $3.8 million, with another $1.5 million for five years of maintenance and operations. 

The Friends’ plan calls for 150 to 175 trees, bike lanes, a nature path, more seating and the creation of wetlands. It would require the city to find up to $15 million to contribute.

Ducks float around the industrial-feeling Jerry’s Pond on Friday. (Photo: Marc Levy)

“The idea that we could spend $12 million to $15 million on Rindge Avenue to create green infrastructure is well within the city’s capacity,” Grunebaum said. “We can do challenging things. We’re a very, very capable city.”

The city granted $600,000 in federal Covid-relief funds in July 2022 to study the Friends’ plan, but the money wasn’t delivered. A new administration took it away in April and redirected the funds to another project. That leaves a lack of clarity around conflicting test results and assessments on soil contamination and environmental benefits such as stormwater absorption.

The policy order Monday would have asked city departments to consider the plan and provide answers despite the missing money, but it failed in a 4-5 vote. 

No investment by city

Councillor Ayesha Wilson, a co-sponsor, grew up near Jerry’s Pond but wasn’t aware of efforts to restore the area until she started to meet with members of the Friends. She – along with councillors and fellow “yes” votes Sumbul Siddiqui, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and vice mayor Marc McGovern – believes the plan takes IQHQ’s work “a little further,” and could provide environmental justice needed in the Rindge Avenue community of more than 4,000 lower-income residents in the largest massing of affordable housing in the city.

Before the meeting, Wilson said she wanted the city to live up to its stated goals of environmental justice, “making sure that we are a city that if we put words on paper, we really, truly put forth the investment to make that happen.”

The sponsors said multiple times that they recognized and appreciated the efforts made by IQHQ, especially on the community outreach front, but wanted the city to invest.

“The city has a history of saying, ‘Well, we don’t have to put money into it,’” Siddiqui said in the meeting. “This is really a once-in-a-lifetime decision, and I think we can spend a little bit more time on it.”

Supporting the IQHQ proposal

Councillors such as Patty Nolan said she believed IQHQ had the best possible plan, and that efforts by the company would be wasted if the order was passed. “I don’t want to pass an order that sends a message to community groups and residents that, after an inclusive process with over 100 meetings, the City Council would ignore that work of consensus and collaboration and ask for an intervention that did not come out of that widespread and inclusive community process,” Nolan said in the meeting.

City staff agreed, noting IQHQ owned the land and that its plan would be less disruptive.

“It’s the best possible project for the location of this type that, from my perspective, was considered a low-impact development project,” deputy city manager Owen O’Riordan said. “There are enormous benefits being provided beyond that, in and around Jerry’s Pond.”

Joining the city’s Department of Public Works in supporting only the IQHQ proposal was a nonprofit called the Alewife Study Group, which formed in 1995 to address environmental concerns in the area. 

History of Jerry’s Pond

As early as 1927, Jerry’s Pond used to draw tens of hundreds of swimmers annually. The company that owned the land, Dewey & Almy Chemical, invested in a bathhouse to promote the recreation.

Ownership transferred in 1954 to W.R. Grace, another chemical company, which deemphasized recreation and installed a chain-link fence around the pond in 1961 – the start of six decades of inaccessibility to the water.

In the 1990s, W.R. Grace began work with a developer to build a shopping center and hotel on the property. The Alewife Study Group, which formed to study the issues surrounding the site and be the community’s voice in the matter, knew the area was a “hazardous waste site” and unfit for development.

Joel Nogic, a founder of the group, said W.R. Grace was not willing to let the group conduct further testing on the site or have input into development plans.

“W.R. Grace has a very bad reputation. They were an international chemical company, and they were totally noncooperative and totally did not work with us, practically at all,” Nogic said. “We had to use measures like getting zoning petitions and zoning moratoriums so that more study of the site could happen around the contamination issues and other things.” 

When IQHQ spent $125 million in 2020 for a 27-acre campus that included the W.R. Grace land, planning began around returning access to the pond.

Adding a voice

Like Wilson, Grunebaum grew up in Cambridge without paying much mind to the fenced-off body of water called Jerry’s Pond – older locals know it as “Jerry’s Pit” – between the Alewife T station and Rindge Avenue.

“I probably walked by it hundreds of times before it ever occurred to me that there was something wrong here,” Grunebaum said.

When the lack of public access began to bother him, Grunebaum and others in North Cambridge formed Friends of Jerry’s Pond to encourage revitalization, formulating a proposal around 2017. When IQHQ gained ownership of Jerry’s Pond and the land around it, the group and lab developer began having regular meetings in 2021, with Mass Audubon and Alewife Study Group included.

Grunebaum said IQHQ has been great to work with over the last two years, with Friends of Jerry’s Pond creating a compromise plan that blends elements of both group’s visions – most notably the addition of a boardwalk. He said he believed the issue comes from the city who does not want to invest in Rindge Avenue.

Two plans at odds

While the Friends are focused on Jerry’s Pond, the Alewife Study Group has broader concerns, and works with IQHQ around its entire campus development. Nogic described meetings as being 60 percent dedicated to the full development area and 40 percent about Jerry’s Pond starting in April 2021, though.

“There was just a back and forth of trading ideas,” Nogic said. “Different community members would share ideas, and then IQHQ would come back one or two meetings later with some changes.”

The main feature the study group advocated for was a clear view of the water, as resident surveys indicated that 33 percent of residents at the 77 Rindge Ave. affordable-housing tower believed a view was most important, followed by crosswalk improvements at 31 percent and more trees at 30 percent.

“That’s one of the things that has been guiding us,” group member Mike Nakagawa said, adding that having fewer trees would make the pond more visible and have “some cooling” as well as make the area “look nicer.”

Cambridge ecology

The average summer heat index in Cambridge is predicted to be around 95 degrees by the 2030s and around 110 degrees by the 2070s, according to a 2021 Resilient Cambridge report.

A 2020 report, “Healthy Forest Healthy City,” showed the importance of trees, including for cooling on hot days, as well as the state of tree canopies in different parts of Cambridge and steps to promote canopy growth. North Cambridge – home to Jerry’s Pond – has 26 percent tree canopy coverage, average for the city.

More green infrastructure could be environmentally beneficial, but the city is investing largely in “gray infrastructure” such as concrete water wells to help manage stormwater, Grunebaum said. These dozen cisterns costing around $25 million each “are necessary for flood prevention, but offer no co-benefits to people in shade, heat relief and other positive impacts of green infrastructure on health, relief from stress and biodiversity,” Friends of Jerry’s Pond said in a fall 2023 report. “At a cost of approximately half of one cistern, the Rindge Greenway would provide substantial flood storage benefits as well as multiple community benefits outlined in this paper.”

“The city is acting as if flooding is the only problem,” Grunebaum said.

Members of the grassroots environmental organization Cambridge Mothers Out Front – though not one who is also a member of the Alewife Study Group – spoke Monday in support of the Friends’ plan. Hannah Mahoney, the group’s communications coordinator, said the broader environmental benefits were needed on Rindge Avenue, “a swath of asphalt and concrete, and it’s subjected to heat extremes and air pollution.”

A wetlands benefit

The Friends’ proposal details a partial fill of the pond in one part to enlarge it elsewhere with a wetland restoration.

University of Massachusetts at Lowell professor Ingeborg Hegemann is a former wetland scientist who has been involved in several restoration projects across the city. She was contacted by the Friends to get her opinion on their proposal and described it as “very interesting.”

There are many environmental benefits to restoring a wetland, such as storm damage protection, groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat restoration, Hegemann said. 

“If one could create a more gentle slope and have variable elevations that go from submergent to emergent to more upland floodplain communities, it allows for water to rise and fall,” Hegemann said. “It’s just a more natural type of condition.”

“Wouldn’t it be more fun to actually see brushes and sedges and different seed heads and different trees, like willows, coming up … it would be a totally different experience,” Hegemann said, referring to IQHQ’s plan for a boardwalk. “Wouldn’t this be wonderful if we can do something to bring that walkway down to earth, so to speak?”

Contaminated … or hazardous?

Nogic said partners of ASG tested the pond’s surrounding soil and found large amounts of asbestos had found its way into the ground through land owners’ activities in the early 20th century. (W.R. Grace denied it vehemently, Nogic said.)

Group member Mike Nakagawa explained how difficult development would be with asbestos in the ground. 

“[Asbestos] doesn’t burn, it doesn’t degrade, it doesn’t evaporate, it doesn’t dissolve. It basically just stays there,” Nakagawa said. “Our concern with this site is it’s right next to the Russell Field, a  youth outdoor recreation facility … if any asbestos would blow over into the fields – the kids are playing, they’re lower to the ground, they’re breathing heavily – it could potentially cause cancer later on.”

Grunebaum said the Friends and Alewife Study Group are talking about different soil, or referring to different tests. “They’re talking about contaminated but not hazardous soil” at the pond, where there was never heavy industrial use, he said. There is 100,000 ton of actual hazardous material that has to be carted away from where IQHQ is building labs, he said, but around the pond is “much less contaminated soil” affected by typical urban uses as opposed to heavy-duty industrial and chemical uses.

Study Group member David Bass, a former hazardous waste assessment and remediation engineer, told WBUR in 2020 that “there is contamination very close to Jerry’s Pond” on a couple of sides but much of the area hasn’t been tested for asbestos; a sampling in 2006 looked at “a few locations on the pond’s banks, and did not find any asbestos,” the station’s Hannah Chanatry wrote.

Next steps

More Conservation Commission meetings are expected after Jan. 22 as IQHQ and city staff delve into jurisdiction and other smaller details, Nogic said.

O’Riordan said he appreciated the sentiment of wanting to perfect the plan for Jerry’s Pond.

“People continue to be concerned as to whether or not we are getting the maximum that we can get out with this project, and I believe that we are,” O’Riordan said. Still, “it’s perfectly reasonable for city councillors to ask for further conversation.”

For Grunebaum, the Monday vote was disappointing in that it showed “the city not living up to its own aspirations written in many reports including Envision, the Urban Forest Master Plan, Open Space Plan and Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment,” he wrote in an email. “We hope to continue working with the developer and the community.”

Conversations will continue throughout the upcoming process, he said.

If all goes smoothly, work reclaiming Jerry’s Pond will begin this summer and be complete in the summer of 2025. But approvals may lengthen the process.

“The idea that there’s a rush to do this is manufactured,” Grunebaum said. “The pond was degraded starting 70 years ago when most of the land around it was paved for commercial purposes. Then it was fenced off 62 years ago. The idea that we should rush to do something on Rindge Avenue rather than trying to do it right feels wrong to us.”

This post was updated Jan. 11, 2023, to address the Alewife Study Group’s history with W.R. Grace.