Chelsea opens newest ‘cool park’

Marking a culmination of years of work and community collaboration, on April 18 Chelsea held the official ribbon cutting for its newest “cool park.”

Named for the late James “Bear” Burke, a former Department of Public Works employee and longtime city resident, the new park has a number of features to serve as a gathering space for the neighborhood and to address heat, including a splash pad, picnic tables covered by a shade structure, a play structure for children, a drinking water fountain, and a communal rain barrel for collecting storm water that can be used by residents to water gardens and trees. The space also has about 30 new trees that are expected to create a dense canopy.

Bear Park is just one of several city efforts to combat extreme heat in the interest of public health. Working with Boston University and GreenRoots, a local environmental justice nonprofit, the city gathered heat mapping data to show the hottest locations in Chelsea at street level. While the entire city is considered a heat island, the lowest income neighborhoods were determined to be the hottest and had the least amount of tree cover.

The city began addressing the heat issue one block at a time a few years ago with its “Cool Block” project. The block with Bear Park, at 212 Congress Ave., was chosen because it is one of the hottest in the city and the sidewalks already needed to be replaced, according to Housing and Community Development Deputy Director Emily Granoff.

At one end of the block was an empty parking lot the city was in the process of acquiring, either for housing or open space. The city also investigated installing a white roof on a Boys & Girls Club building on the block — a project that didn’t work in that location, but was installed on a local housing authority building instead.

“The park was really the very heavily desired thing by the community in that site,” Granoff said.

The park is the result of the strong partnership between the city and GreenRoots, which worked extensively with the community and acquired grant funding to run a “tree keepers” program, which pays residents to water the new trees planted as part of the sidewalk replacement and canopy investment.

Granoff said the city plants many trees, but a sizable percentage don’t survive because they’re already in “a vulnerable state” when they’re planted, “and it is hard for us to make sure that we are watering them enough and consistently enough.”

“GreenRoots created a neighborhood group, paid them for their time, and I don’t think a single one of those trees has died, which is a remarkable success rate,” she said.

The city and GreenRoots worked with the community to determine what they needed in a park space, setting up a temporary “guerrilla” park in the space to bring out community members, talk with them and see what resonated.

Funding for the park came from a Parkland Acquisitions and Renovations for Communities grant through the Massachusetts Division of Conservation Services, a grant through GreenRoots that came from an anonymous foundation, and some city funds. The anonymous grant helped cover costs associated with remediating the site, which was heavily contaminated with lead.

While building a new park can be expensive, even pocket parks can provide many benefits for reducing heat island effects and expanding the available network of open space, Granoff said. Communities should be on the lookout for opportunities to partner with property owners, or build relationships with private buildings to educate them on heat reduction methods.

“Chelsea has, in my experience, been pretty uniquely focused on, ‘Where is there land that is too small or too weirdly shaped or not zoned right to be housing? Let’s make it open space,’” Granoff said. “Because our community just doesn’t have enough of it. And because we knew this empty lot was going to be a park so long before we had the funding to build the park, we were able to work with GreenRoots to do some really intensive community engagement.”