On Dec. 19, the Thursday before Christmas, the MBTA’s board of directors took their seats in a second-floor conference room in a Park Plaza building. Nutcrackers set a festive tone, alongside silver tinsel and an oversized ornament as red and round as a yoga ball. The mood mixed exhaustion and eagerness. MBTA manager and recently minted local celebrity Phillip Eng was set to deliver his year-end report, and for the first time in a long time, Boston area stockings expected better from the T than just another lump of coal.
Unbeknown to the board, though, a campaign was poised to launch. As soon as the period of public comment was opened, wham, activists from Cambridge and Arlington sprang into rhetorical action, taking turns at a podium that represented the focal point of at least a dozen expert stares.
Well, stares might be too strong a term: At the start, only lukewarm attention was paid. Board members such as Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Monica Tibbits-Nutt and Quincy mayor Thomas P. Koch listened stone-faced. Eng was gazing into his laptop, perhaps anticipating the moment he could present his many hard-won triumphs of the past year, not least of which was returning a claimed 2.4 million minutes a day to T riders by fixing slow service.
The parade of speakers, though, caused the board to wake up. Looks got exchanged. Notes taken. Eng blinked, his head cocked to one side as if he was hearing whatever note tells managers we just might have a problem.
At issue, for the activists, were two MBTA projects at the Alewife station: the rebuilding of the parking garage and the digging of a new access tunnel, the Hi-Rail Tunnel for red line maintenance vehicles.
The projects themselves are worthy. The massive brutalist ramparts of Alewife’s parking garage have been crumbling for years, and better maintenance access on the red line will minimize service disruptions. But both projects are taking shape against a backdrop of the public health horrors affecting Alewife’s land and waters. Raw sewage gets dumped regularly into Alewife Brook through Combined Sewer Overflows. Massive amounts of asbestos lie buried in the postindustrial soil where the MBTA plans to excavate its tunnel.
Two speakers from activist group Save the Alewife Brook stood forth first. Member Eugene Benson made the legal points like the retired environmental justice lawyer he is, pointing out how badly out of compliance on clean water standards Cambridge and the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority are. Then group founder (and Arlington Town Council member) Kristin Anderson brought the emotion, her voice quavering as she described her household being inundated and sickened by raw sewage. The numbers cited – 51 million gallons of sewer overflow in 2021 – seemed to rouse the listeners from any remaining torpor. “We have two asks,” she and Benson emphasized. One was to leave room for underground CSO detention tanks in MBTA’s rebuilding plans (with Anderson adding a more expansive wish that the T consider further green stormwater management infrastructure).
Then one speaker after another from Cambridge’s Cambridge4Trees or living in North Cambridge hammered at the issue of asbestos and the tunnel plans. It was a rhetorical tour de force of environmental alarm-sounding, centering on the lifelong risk to children, not just those resident in the neighborhood, but the not-small percentage of Cambridge youth who play on and near Russell Field, where Cambridge Rindge and Latin School’s Falcons teams practice. The tone was respectful – several highlighted the “new T” under Eng and took time to appreciate that they’d ridden a newly speedy red line train to get to this meeting – but there were pointed questions. Why was the T proposing to use a looser standard of safety for handling asbestos than the town of Cambridge specifies? Why were so many trees being sacrificed? Why was there no public consideration of an alternate tunnel site nearby, where there are fewer trees and no asbestos to worry about?
Most fundamentally: Why wasn’t the public consulted on this plan?
Nothing about Alewife had been mentioned in any official agenda. But these speakers put it squarely in the room, central to consideration.
I wanted to stand up and cheer.
Not just as a neighbor of the Alewife MBTA stop, a sometime-kayaker of the Alewife Brook and a parent whose kids grew up playing baseball and lacrosse at Russell Field, but as someone who struggles with activism and yet knows how much a community depends on those with a sense of place – and an instinct to protect.
I’ve lived in Cambridge now for more than 20 years. For the first 15, you would not have found me at a scene such as Thursday’s, or any hearings or public comment periods. This wasn’t for lack of opinions – it was for a felt lack of standing.
Objectively speaking, I was as deeply implicated as anyone in the policy decisions that affect our city and region: All of us who live in Cambridge and Boston struggle with traffic, housing costs, real estate developments, tax rates, library hours, street cleaning, you name it.
But I was raised in a Navy family, moving every two or three years. I lived my childhood as a participant-observer, encountering the curious customs of communities to which I never felt I belonged. One November, school would be in Hawaii: flip-flops and shorts and learning to sing Keola Beamer’s “Honolulu City Lights.” The next, I’d be shivering under a ragg wool hat in Connecticut and writing essays about how Col. Ledyard was betrayed and murdered by that fiend Benedict Arnold. My father’s career arose from duty to country, but his way of life left my brother and sister and me floating, unsure of whether we had firm enough bonds with our fellow citizens to talk to them at lunch, much less to stand our ground.
My temperament and habits – those of someone just passing through – persisted even after I’d made the firm vow to raise my children differently, not as nomads but as members in a stable community. It was through my children that, eventually, I started to unlearn my detachment.
It began with the schools. So many decisions affected us, from curriculum to whether the city should ditch its K-8 model for K-5 with middle school. Then there were sports teams. I had been an indifferent fan, but when one son was batting third in the North Cambridge Little League, and another made Cambridge Pride basketball, I felt every game. Do I care what happens at Russell Field? Ask me how many hours I’ve spent watching my son battling it out on the Falcons’ lacrosse squad. Not just him but his teammates, some of whom I’d known since, as preschoolers, they’d counted it a triumph to tie their own shoes.
Health is in there, too, of course. When, by a small miracle, we scraped together enough money to buy a small condo, I began to worry about air pollution from nearby traffic and along Alewife Brook where we walked the dog. How worrisome was it that the W.R. Grace company headquarters was just a few blocks away, and wasn’t that the company that featured in “A Civil Action,” about the superfund site where someone’s child got leukemia and … asbestos at Jerry’s Pond!? It was all stuff I ended up researching and writing about.
Which led to this column, which I titled “A Sense of Place,” on how we inhabit Cambridge as a community. The world we live in now is one where global warming makes every decision more complicated. We’ll need our tree cover to survive hotter summers, our wetlands to handle increased flooding. We need to plan not just for affordable housing and economic development, but hardiness in the face of ever-increasing challenge. How do we make this work?
One vital part of the answer is activism. I won’t pretend to know, at the outset, whether one site or another is best for a T maintenance tunnel, or how technically or financially feasible it is to build floodwater management and green space into a parking garage (though I do reserve space for an opinion later, once more information is available). But I do know that local knowledge will be part of every successful plan – and that often that knowledge is hidden from centralized planners. They don’t know what they don’t know.
It’s the role of the activist to alert them. The role can be enormously costly in time and emotional energy. To take just that Thursday meeting as an example, presents were going unshopped-for, elderly relatives were going unvisited and urgent, pressing, end-of-year-so-you-can-go-on-vacation work was going unfinished by the people who showed up to speak. To develop convictions, and commitment, is to inform yourself, to invest – and to risk getting burned, or burned out. More than a few activists wind up exhausted, hurt and isolated when decisions don’t go their way; they’re hurt by others’ inaction, by authorities who ultimately go with the suboptimal plan. Even their triumphs often get second-guessed. It’s a thin line between earning a reputation as community guardian and as a not-in-my-backyard obstructionist.
One way to understand why democracy is the worst system of government – except, as Winston Churchill quipped, for all the others that have been tried – is that it’s richest in information. What’s the best way to build the complex networks of transportation and waterways, housing and shopping, communications and coexistence, in a complex space such as the Alewife basin, which until recently was a Great Swamp and is rapidly being reassembled into an (aspirationally) great biotech center? Here’s how it should work: The MBTA proposes. Cambridge proposes. Developers propose. The people … dispose.
At year’s end, then, I want to celebrate those who do the work, who are out there. Who remind the city of Cambridge that we’re not just a collection of people who happen to be here: We’re what the city is, the living conduit between its inheritance and its legacy. We’re the ones to bring us across the line into 2025.
Greg Harris is the founding editor of the literary magazine Pangyrus and the founder and co-director of Harvard LITfest. His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Review, Jewish Fiction, Earth Island Journal and elsewhere.
This post was updated Dec. 29 to correct that Cambridge4Trees had speakers at the Dec, 19 meeting, not the Alewife Study Group.
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Thank you, Mr. Harris. Every activist has to start somewhere. We need more thoughtful activists, not more doctrinaire ideologues, so come join us.
Great essay Greg and that photo is worth a few thousand more words! Literally an open sewer in Cambridge… clearly more activism is needed because government at all levels has failed on this one (so far.)
One thing I wanted to note is regarding the phrase “asbestos at Jerry’s Pond!?”
To quote the engineering report Haley & Aldrich prepared after they tested the pond sediments and water in 2021: “Is there contamination in Jerry’s Pond from the former Grace Site that poses risk to people and wildlife? Testing results say NO.”
This is why – with no objections from activists that I’m aware of – the lab developer IQHQ dug a huge stormwater storage facility here without following the Cambridge asbestos standard of “Tent & Vent” (with negative pressure and HEPA filters.)
To be clear, with no objections from the City or activists, last summer, a huge amount of soil was excavated next to Jerry’s Pond – about 1/2 to 3/4-acre in size – to dig a depressed gravel pit, akin to a dry well which will only be wet during a 100-year storm event and supports the commercial purpose of lab development rather than restoring the ecology.
Pollution at Jerry’s Pond has become an “urban legend” (as Charlie Sullivan, Historical Commission Director, put it), untethered from the results of current testing. For generations, this has been used as one of the many excuses to avoid doing any ecological restoration of the pit into a pond which could provide enough land for 150-175 shade-providing, heat-island-cooling trees, healthier air and a new green-space across from the Rindge Towers, as well as new biodiverse wetlands – as opposed to the hard-scape boardwalks hammered or screwed into the banks and 20-30 mostly ornamental-scale trees which the developer’s plan provides.
Contrast the digging around Jerry’s Pond with the public reaction to the MBTA’s proposed tunnel which has created significant – and justified opposition – because north of Alewife Linear Path is in fact where the former Grace site *is* highly contaminated with hazardous waste. Sadly, government authorities and businesses are fine digging in areas near Jerry’s Pond – with or without pollution – to support transit goals and commercial lab development, but not however for ecological restoration and for the creation of a climate resilient green-space.
oh, Greg, this is wonderful.. Yes, please keep being an activist in all the ways you define.
And Eric, thanks for continuing to be an activist.