‘$5 MILLION FOR WHAT?’
Medal of Honor Park a Southie eyesore as Massport builds gem
What follows is a tale of two parks. Both are located within a stone’s throw of each other in South Boston.
One is a city park that sits atop the East Broadway hill in South Boston and dates back about 150 years. The other park is brand new, belongs to Massport and is located two minutes away.
After nearly $2 million in renovation so far, one is still a bit of a mess. The other looks like the Garden of Eden. Care to guess which one belongs to the city?
That would be Medal of Honor Park, where grass has given way to large patches of dirt, and a quarter of the park is still fenced off in the hopes that the hydro seed will eventually take root and cover the naked patches of dirt.
On Sunday, Mayor Marty Walsh came up to Medal of Honor Park for the 36th anniversary of the South Boston Vietnam Memorial. He happened to mention the $5 million capital improvement project the city targeted for the park.
“I almost fainted,” Joanne McDevitt said, “$5 million for what? OK, so they put new tar down for the pathways. They’ve got a Victorian fence that spans the front of the park between M and N streets. Yes, they built a new playground with water showers for the kids, but you’ve already had several break their arms.”
McDevitt told me that for $5 million, Medal of Honor Park should be carpeted in Fenway Park grass. Or at the very least the kind of lush green turf that Massport laid down in the nearby Thomas J. Butler Memorial Park.
And she happens to be right.
Indeed, while contractors for the city were pushing dirt around on top of East Broadway during late winter and early spring, Massport was creating an oasis a few minutes away.
That park, named after Thomas J. Butler, a Southie native who served as Massport’s director of government and community relations, is a landscaping gem designed to offset the effects of a new freight haul road.
Yesterday, Chris Cook, who oversees the city’s parks, agreed that the Thomas J. Butler park was beautiful. “Massport does a first-rate job with its parks,” Cook said.
At the same time, Cook admitted to me the city was “very disappointed” with the so-called restoration effort at Medal of Honor Park.
He did want to point out that the $5 million figure Marty Walsh mentioned Sunday included the lower half of M Street Park, with softball and Little League diamonds.
That still means the city spent nearly $2 million on a children’s playground with water sprinklers, a black Victorian fence that spans a block, a smattering of new benches, a few young trees, an antique-styled water bubbler that can accommodate pets and, oh yes, don’t forget those resurfaced walkways.
Cook says by next spring the hydro seed should take root and those dirt patches in Medal of Honor Park will be green again. Let’s hope.
Things might have been better all the way around if Marty had checked with Massport to see who was creating a park meant to last.