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Spring 2004

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The Wildest Place in Boston

Manhattan's Hottest Property

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The Wildest Place in Boston
A handful of UMass alumni help reclaim the Boston Harbor Islands' natural glory

–Christopher O'Carroll ’97




	Landscape architect Sue Brown ’00G helped transform Spectacle Island from a harbor eyesore into a new visitor gateway to the park using 3.7 million cubic yards of fill from the Big Dig. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY YOU get invited to help rebuild an island. For Sue Brown ’00G, the invitation came as a job offer from the Boston Parks Department. “They hired me as project manager for Central Artery landscape development issues,” says Brown, who holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture and regional planning. The job involved oversight responsibility for numerous parks affected by the Big Dig, and first on Brown’s agenda was a reclamation project in Boston Harbor—a project aimed to transform one of the harbor’s islands from a foul-smelling eyesore into a sparkling new tourist attraction.

Spectacle Island, embodiment of some of the Boston waterfront’s most notorious history, thrived as an offshore red-light district in the 19th century and festered as an environmental disaster area in the 20th. After the city began using Spectacle as a dumpsite in the 1920s, the island steadily leaked pollution into the sea for decades.
In recent years, however, Boston Harbor has undergone a makeover as spectacular as anything on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Boats that once churned up an unwholesome brown froth a generation ago now throw white wakes as they navigate among the harbor’s many islands. Seals and dolphins glisten in the now clean water. And Spectacle Island, its landfill capped by 3.7 million cubic yards of Big Dig excavation material (think three and a half QE2s) is scheduled for grand reopening in June.

Spectacle’s 105 acres now boasts panoramic views from a built-up hill that is the highest point of land in the harbor. Its reincarnation will welcome visitors with a new dock and marina, a café, art installations, two beaches, and five miles of trails winding among thousands of newly planted trees, shrubs and plants. Just minutes from the mainland by ferry, the reborn island will be an irresistible destination all by itself, yet it’s actually part of something much bigger.

Sixteen harbor islands were protected from commercial development in the 1970s when Massachusetts’ lawmakers created a state park. Two decades later, innovative federal legislation combined those 16 islands with 18 others, giving birth to Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area in 1997. Spectacle is one of 34 islands that make up the park, a public facility that holds a unique place in park system history.

Sue Brown is one of several UMass Amherst alums who share first-of-its-kind management partnership for this public space. Brown’s employer, the city of Boston, is a key player in the park’s administration. Local, state and federal agencies take a hand as well as several private, nonprofit entities. Peter Lewenberg ’69, a former UMass trustee, now Special Assistant for the Boston Harbor Islands for the state’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, holds up the park’s diverse management partnership as a model of cooperation between the public and private sectors.

When Congress created the Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area, it also established the park’s distinctive management structure, under which 13 organizations share administrative responsibility backed by an advisory council of 28 other groups. “Similar arrangements have been tried since 1997,” says Lewenberg “but at the time this group management system was a unique departure from established National Park Service practice.”

It’s a national park in which the Park Service doesn’t own a single square inch of land, explains Lewenberg; “The only federal landowner involved is the Coast Guard.” The rest of the park islands are owned by the state of Massachusetts, the cities of Boston and Winthrop, the town of Hingham, the Trustees of Reservations, and Thompson Island Outward Bound, a wilderness leadership school for adolescents.

The complex partnership might look like a blueprint for gridlock. But participants report that the park’s management team gets its challenging job done. “It appears to be working,” says Sue Brown. “I don’t know why it’s working, but it’s working.”

“Everybody’s interested in being a player,” Lewenberg adds. “There is meaningful cooperation. There is progress being made in developing the park.”

Strewn across 50 square miles of Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay, the islands offer an alluring diversity of attractions. On Little Brewster Island, Boston Light beams out over the Atlantic from the oldest lighthouse site in the United States, in operation since 1716. World’s End, one of several park islands accessible by car, features rocky cliffs, tidal flats and fresh and saltwater marshes alongside 19th-century landscaping by the famous designer Frederick Law Olmsted. On Deer Island, a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant looks like part of a Star Trek set, its dozen egg-shaped tanks towering 140 feet in the air. It coexists harmoniously with 60 acres set aside for nature-lovers.

Several of the islands are home to historic forts in various states of ruin and repair. Foremost among them is Fort Warren, a magnificent specimen of mid-19th-century military architecture named for American Revolution hero Joseph Warren, who fell at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Located on Georges Island, which attracts more visitors than any other island in the park, Fort Warren features granite walls 10 feet thick and parapets that afford sumptuous views of the harbor. The island hosts an annual encampment of re-enactors costumed in Civil War uniforms and weaponry. Lore has it the island is haunted by the ghost of a Confederate spy who was hanged at the fort.

No island in the park lies farther than 11 miles from the traffic and commerce of downtown Boston. Many are accessible by ferry service in season, and many more attract rowers, kayakers and other adventurous souls with personal watercraft. Yet for all their proximity to the urban hurly-burly, the islands hold pockets of escape-to-Eden wilderness. Visitors to the park experience the paradox of being in the heart of an urban environment—literally surrounded by Greater Boston—yet splendidly isolated on a speck of land in the middle of the ocean.

Development of the islands escalated in the 20th century. This gave rise to preservation efforts that eventually played a vital role in the creation of the park. Two nonprofit groups led by UMass alumni, the Island Alliance and Volunteers and Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands, championed the cause of the islands so energetically that the legislation creating the park wrote both organizations into the management structure.

Steve Marcus ’73, chairman of Volunteers and Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands (“Friends” for short), describes himself as “born and raised at UMass.” Marcus Hall is named for his father, the late Engineering Professor Joseph Marcus ’54G. Today, the younger Marcus is co-proprietor of Sparhawk Group, a Boston consulting firm. Away from the office he volunteers hundreds of hours to Friends’ projects ranging from island cleanup and beautification efforts to harbor cruises and educational programs. Last year, Friends celebrated 25 years of service by garnering awards from the National Association of State Park Directors and the National Park Service’s Volunteers-in-Parks program.

Marcus admits Friends’ members were uneasy about the transition from state to national park status. He knew they would face challenges in working cooperatively with so many groups, each guided by different agendas and organizational cultures. “Now that the partnership has had a few years to prove itself, the Friends believe that the islands have a promising future under the new arrangement,” says Marcus. “Most of our members feel that it’s a good thing, because the managers are so competent and caring about the resource.”

One particularly competent and caring manager on the team is Kathy Abbott ’80, who spent several years as president and CEO of the nonprofit Island Alliance. Under Abbott, the Island Alliance raised more than $10 million in private donations to support the park. Abbot recently crossed over to the public sector but remains committed to the islands. As Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, she leads one of the state agencies managing the park.

Abbott originally came to UMass as a Stockbridge School of Agriculture student. “I thought I wanted to work with trees,” she recalls. During an internship at Minuteman National Park in Concord, she learned about park maintenance (and the unglamorous manual labor associated with it) and began to realize she was interested in more than just the trees. Abbott wanted to study the entire complex ecosystem of which trees are just one component. She was also curious about the social and political environment that supports a national park system in the first place.

After obtaining an associate’s degree in arboriculture and park management, Abbott went on to earn her bachelor of science from the department of landscape architecture and regional planning. Later she earned a master’s in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Abbott’s new position is not her first foray into state government; she held previous posts in the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs and the Department of Environmental Management. As a former ranger, Abbott’s vision of park management combines sophisticated administrative skills with authentic dirt-under-the-fingernails experience.

Abbott traces her passion for the Harbor Islands to the time she spent early in her career as a park ranger on Gallops Island. Out on the harbor at the end of the day, watching the sun sink behind the city, she’d marvel at the dramatic changes of light transforming the Boston skyline into a natural wonder. “It’s a life changing experience,” she says.

For more information visit: www.bostonislands.com

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