Lynn transforms landfill into waterfront park

A once-neglected landfill on the Lynn waterfront has been reborn as Lynn Harbor Park, a 30-acre public space offering walking paths, benches, and sweeping views of the harbor from Nahant to the Boston skyline for residents to enjoy.

“For a long time, [the waterfront] housed the city’s least desirable uses,” Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson said. “A landfill in this instance, but also the wastewater treatment plant, transfer station, natural gas, electrical superstructure. The city has really made a concerted effort over the last couple decades to reconnect the city to its waterfront.”

The park opened to the public in July, and the city held a ribbon cutting ceremony on Sept. 23, with officials from Lynn and state agencies along with Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll.

The park sits on the site of a former manufactured gas plant, which later became a landfill. Over the years, its condition deteriorated to the point of a potential collapse, threatening to spill waste into the harbor. Shoreline conditions led to a decades-long effort spearheaded by Lynn officials to reconnect the city to its waterfront, mostly recently in the form of Waterfront Open Space Master Plan in 2019.

Nicholson said the city’s goals for the waterfront were to prioritize community benefits.

“A critical part of that is to have open space that people can enjoy and participate in what’s happening on the waterfront,” he said.

Charter Development, a New England-based land remediation and development company, was brought in to cap the landfill and reinforce the shoreline to mitigate potential environmental impacts. Charter staff instead proposed developing the land and bringing in landscape architects to turn the landfill into a public park, like Cambridge’s Danehy Park and Boston’s Spectacle Island.

The city signed a memorandum of understanding with Charter and the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs in 2022, and another in 2023 with MassDevelopment and the Economic Development and Industrial Corporation of Lynn to develop the site.

Nicholson said he’s focused on inclusive growth, ensuring that the waterfront “holds space for Lynn residents so that they can participate in and benefit from the transformed open space.”

Lynn Harbor Park is a component of a larger vision to make Lynn’s waterfront and the surrounding area inclusive of the larger Lynn community. A 550-unit apartment building just south of the park is already leasing to tenants, with another development in the pipeline that will add 850 units and 26,000 square feet of commercial space to the waterfront, along with a public park and promenade.

“I think we have a particular moment here where we have a lot of momentum,” Nicholson said, “where we’ve been able to accelerate the planning timeline and achieve a really important level of collaboration between the city and the state, but also within the city.

“In a lot of ways, the city sort of turned its back on the waterfront, and projects like this are giving us a chance to reverse that and let us reclaim it.”