Kristen Joy Emack’s tree makes an appearance in the newly published CCF Annual Report, “Custodians of our City,” which features a photo essay celebrating the often-unseen people who protect, support, and sustain the people, places, and ideas that make Cambridge the city we love.
In the blue brightness of an early spring morning the still-cold wind blew through the Sycamore branches, and the seeds of my kin broke loose from their seed balls and floated to the ground like tiny parachutes. A young botanist in plum colored britches carefully collected them from the ground to take back to England to catalog. He couldn’t imagine then that these seeds would be used to make a hybrid of my cousin, the American Sycamore, and the Oriental plane, popular in Europe at that time. He didn’t know that this hybrid would be named the London plane and would be valued for its tenacious tendency to grow in the poorest city soil. This curious, studious lad would never have guessed that a century after he was gone I would be transported here – or would be standing here still – a silent steward and witness to 243 years of Cambridge history.
On the York Street side of Donnelly Field is an enormous London plane tree that sits in the middle of a long strip of manicured grass, separating the sidewalk from the surrounding streets. I’ve walked past this tree many times, and considering its size, imagined its age and all of the moments in history it has grown up alongside.
Donnelly Field, originally called Cambridge Field, is in East Cambridge bordered by historic triple deckers, public housing and single-family homes. It hosts a school, a Head Start, a library and after-school program – alongside courts, fields and a pool. Last Summer a temporary structure called Shade was added, designed and used by our young people.
It’s been on the map since Colonial Europeans relocated to occupy land long settled by the Massachusett people and used by the Nipmunk and Wampanoag.
In the 1700s it was used for cattle grazing. In 1809, Andrew Craigie, a 19th century Boston developer, bought farmland near the Science Museum. He and partners built a bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge that was followed quickly by a building boom. Factories were built and streets were added that still boast the names of investors such as Gore, Otis and Thorndike. Newer immigrants arrived and soon East Cambridge grew more populous. Soap, glass and furniture factory workers began living in proximity to Donnelly Field in tenement houses, rentals and tin shanties.
In the late 1800s a popular movement aimed at creating open green spaces was embraced by Cambridge. It was thought that public land could provide opportunities for leisure, and these “pleasure-grounds,” as they were coined, would be particularly helpful for the health of the working class. The city of Cambridge bought the field in 1893 and hired the Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot Firm – famous for designing Central Park in New York City and the Emerald Necklace park system in Boston – to turn Cambridge Field into a beautiful public park. A brick field house, curved pathways and bushes were added, and trees were bought and planted around the edge of the field.
Among them were multiple London planes. The London plane is often mistaken for a Sycamore. They share similar bark with spotty, camouflagelike patterns, hanging seed pods and crested, palm-sized leaves. But they are not the same species. The London plane is more like the Sycamore’s cousin. In the mid-1600s visiting botanists were cataloging the flora in the colonies and returned to England with seeds of the American Sycamore. They crossbred those seeds with the Oriental Plane. What was born of this marriage was named the London plane and grew quickly in value, as it was capable of thriving in the sooty soil left by the London fires of 1666. As a hybrid, the London plane proved adaptable and hardy and, like the Puritans before them, were transported across the Atlantic and transplanted in the colonies.
Cambridge keeps a database of the trees owned by the city, and every two years the diameter of each tree is measured and updated. This particular London plane’s measurements places its beginning roughly around the year 1781, or 243 years ago. From the start it was destined to be a special tree. It was born at the same time Mum Bett, whose story is part of our Cambridge Public Schools social studies curriculum, successfully filed a lawsuit for her immediate release from enslavement. On Aug. 22, 1781, a jury agreed in her favor. She changed her name immediately to Elizabeth Freeman. Her victory meant the state could no longer justify the institution of slavery. It was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783, when our tree was just a sapling.
Our London plane was getting ready to unfurl her young leaves a mere six years after Paul Revere’s famous ride and the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill was lost to the British. She had soaked up her first Summer’s worth of sun less than a decade after the delegates signed The Declaration of Independence in August 1776, and later, at the signing of the Paris Treaty.
Many of the trees planted on the edges of Donnelly Field succumbed to disease or other conditions and had to be replaced. Records found at the Cambridge Historical Commission contain detailed logs of trees bought for decades after the park opened. Our London plane’s roots held firmly to the ground. In the winters, during its dormancy, the park was flooded to make an impromptu temporary ice-skating rink, and it watched as thousands of ice skaters in Victorian dress would glide and fall and laugh their way across the flooded field.
For nearly 100 years it watched as exhausted laborers returned home after a full day working at the John P. Squire & Co. pig slaughterhouse in East Cambridge near the modern-day Twin City Plaza.
As industry grew, a wave of immigrants from Ireland made East Cambridge their new home. Saint Patrick’s Church was built directly across from our London plane to support the spiritual needs of the Irish arrivals. The great tree grew alongside the congregation. It remained a quiet onlooker later, too, as the demographics of the neighborhood changed once more. When the grandchildren of those early Irish immigrants moved out of Cambridge 80 years later, the church was sold to the nonprofit Just A Start and became housing for lower-income families. Just as the London plane witnessed a fire that destroyed the temporary Veteran Housing buildings on the Berkshire side of the park in 1946, again in 2016, it stood across the street as the former Saint Patrick’s Church and the homes surrounding it were engulfed in a devastating, 10-alarm fire hat took an unforgiving hold on the neighborhood on a bitterly cold, windy December day. Undamaged, at least to the human eye, our tree watched as the same building was gutted and rebuilt so all that remains of the original St. Patrick’s Church is a simple stained glass quatrefoil window nestled in the façade of the building.
A witness tree is an organism alive during remarkable, difficult and historic times. Our London plane has called Donnelly Field its home for well over 200 years. It was a seedling a full 70 years before the Civil War, and the great migration that followed. It has witnessed waves of demographic and economic shifts and lived through a 1938 hurricane that ripped through Cambridge with 120 mph winds. It watched our city in the grip of the 1918 flu epidemic and sat in near silence in 2020 when youth sporting events stopped and the Valente library closed and families were too afraid to leave the house fearing they would contract Covid. It has seen some of our city’s saddest moments, such as the June night a beautiful high school sophomore named Charlene Holmes was killed by gun violence as she sat on a neighbor’s steps after school. Some of our most joyful simple victories, too, have unfolded under its steady gaze. It watched as young Gordon Wiacek and Kymani Goodrich – both coached by their dads – pitched and caught their way to a great final game in the 2024 East Cambridge Little League season.
Next time you drive or walk past Donnelly Field, look for the looming London plane with branches thick as tree trunks. It’s been anchored there for centuries – a quiet, gentle custodian of our constantly evolving city. Its history is our history.
Timeline
1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17
1775 Paul Revere’s ride, April 18
1775 On the eve of The American Revolution, 800 British soldiers marched to Gore street from Lechmere Point on their way to Lexington and Concord, April 19
1776 Declaration of Independence signed
1781 Birth of the London plane tree
1781 Mum Bett, later known as Elizabeth Freeman, petitioned the Massachusetts courts for her immediate release from the institution of slavery
1783 slavery is outlawed in Massachusetts
1783 Treaty of Paris signed, Sept. 3
1809 Craigie Bridge opens connecting Boston and Cambridge
1862 Civil War begins
1846 East Cambridge, Cambridgeport and Old Cambridge incorporate and Cambridge becomes a city
1896 Cambridge Field opens as public park
1889 Maria Baldwin is appointed principal of the Agassi School in
Cambridge, becoming the first African-American female principal in Massachusetts and the Northeast.The school was renamed in her honor 115 years later.
1910 St. Patrick’s Church is built
19181918 flu epidemic
1938 Newtowne Court is built, one of the country’s oldest housing projects
1938 Hurricane
1940sTemporary veterans housing built next to Donnelly Field
1948 Gold Star Mothers Pool opened
1960 Cambridge Field renamed Donnelly Field after John Donnelly, a longtime superintendent of parks
1978 Blizzard
2012 Charlene Holmes is killed by gun violence on the Willow Street side of field
2016 A 10-alarm fire on York and Berkshire streets, Dec. 3
2016 City passes Indigenous Peoples Day resolution, June 6
2020 Covid pandemic
2020 Moderna develops life-saving Covid vaccine
2021 Author, civil rights activist and Cambridge resident Robert Moses dies. Moses was a MacArthur Fellow, best known for Freedom Summer,The Algebra Project and The Young People’s Project.
2023 London plane trees react to extreme precipitation and shed copiously to avoid bark rot during during one of the wettest summers on record – a survival response in the face of climate change
2023 First annual Cambridge-Somerville Asian Festival
A stronger
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