Chelsea Cool: A Community-Led Landscape and Placemaking Installation (2022)
Origin
My involvement with the Chelsea Cool project began in March 2022 when I led a design charrette for Northeastern’s urban landscape club (Adapt). We worked with the Boston Society of Landscape Architects and environmental justice organization GreenRoots to transform 212 Congress Ave, a parcel owned by a neighboring developer interested in relinquishing the then abandoned parking lot for city control and conversion into a park. Adapt brainstormed both short-term installation possibilities as well as long-term plans to activate and cool the space to promote environmental justice, while creating a new public park space. Additionally, I volunteered throughout March and April with the BSLA at neighborhood events to understand their needs for the future park.
Photo credits: Graham Moitoso and Gretchen Rabinkin
Process
In June 2022, GreenRoots won a grant from the Barr Foundation to fund the short-term park and BSLA was asked to facilitate the design and continued engagement for the park. Hired as Project Manager through the BSLA, I was tasked with acquiring and reusing materials, finding volunteers for every build session, preparing the site for safe use (including coordinating toxic chemical remediation and removing hazardous materials), coordinating professional volunteers for design brainstorms and co-managing the project budget.
Relying on a different group of volunteers for each build resulted in an engaging, yet challenging, process, and over twenty weeknight and weekend sessions were necessary to complete work by mid-September. Being a small organization, BSLA would not have been able to complete this project without these many volunteers, especially GreenRoots’ youth ECO team, Bianca Bowman, Isaac Leib and Claudia LaFontaine.
Below are two examples of posters that I designed to inform neighbors, rally volunteers and lead youth engagement
Build
This series of photos depicts the summer process of engagement and community care. We disassembled a previous landscape installation to reuse lobster traps, built a path through the upper half of the site, reused twenty cable reels for planters and seating, planted native grasses and shrubs with pollinators, painted the asphalt to reflect heat, built a swing set designed by volunteer Mitch Ryerson and cut through the fence ringing the lower half of the site to connect the space with the surrounding neighborhood.
Photo credits: Graham Moitoso and Gretchen Rabinkin
Celebration
BSLA and GreenRoots planned an opening ceremony for the installation to coincide with ASLA’s Parking Day, a national movement to reclaim open space from car infrastructure for community benefit. Hundreds of neighbors and landscape architecture fans came for the event and everyone gathered to celebrate the new space as a neighborhood anchor. Through the long-term future of the park and the lease transfer from the developer are still being handled by the City of Chelsea, residents and GreenRoots were able to take back former industrially contaminated land and plan for further health and environment-focused events to call out the City of Boston’s historic industrial abuse of Chelsea.
Climate change-focused Turnaround Films produced a documentary about urban heat islands and the Chelsea Cool Block initiative, including a segment about this park. Please view the film here if you are interested!
Photo credits: Graham Moitoso and Gretchen Rabinkin
