view

Welcome to The Watershed

Leading up to the June 2019 grand opening of Encore Boston Harbor, neighboring residents had mixed feelings about the resort’s façade. Passersby quoted by Beth Teitell, staff writer for the Boston Globe, shared their impressions for an April 2019 story in the paper. “It’s the same color as the lamp in my grandma’s apartment,” one said. Others likened it to “old union hall brown,” “70s car brown,” and “taupe.”¹

The patented ‘Wynn Bronze’ glass abuts the Boston skyline, welcoming inbound commuters on Route 93, one of the main arteries into downtown Boston.

Skyline view of Encore and its surroundings, taken by the author in January 2020

Michael Weaver, the Chief Communications Officer for Wynn Resorts, countered with a multi-part “Well, actually…” defense of the casino’s appearance. He told Teitell that the design was, in fact, iconic enough to be a part of the LEGO Las Vegas architecture set,  that “it creates a very warm, inviting glow inside the rooms” and “offers a beautiful reflection of its surroundings at night.”

The brand’s vision for the resort was, from the onset, cloaked with altruistic motivations; new, well-paying jobs for service workers from the casino’s neighboring communities, among the most diverse and least affluent in the state. Further injections into the local economy via tourism and tax dollars. And of course, the revitalization of a former toxic waste site reviled by its neighbors for the noxious odors it gave off.

Pre-Project Proposed View of the Casino from the Mystic River, as presented in a 2013 Wynn Resort Expanded Environmental Notification Form²

Indeed, this casino resort is built on a plot of land previously occupied by a series of chemical manufacturers, many of whom had a propensity for allowing manufacturing waste biproducts to bleed into the ground and spread into the surrounding communities. Moreover, the site does not exist in isolation — the 34 acres of surface land on which the Wynn casino is built sits adjacent to the confluence of the Mystic River watershed, the Charles River, and the Boston Harbor.

Situated just outside the ostensibly progressive beacon that is Boston, MA, the earth beneath 1 Broadway in Everett, Massachusetts serves as a comprehensive archive of industrialization’s leftovers. What follows is the origin story of some of these subsurface toxins, their ecological consequences felt throughout one of the most populated watersheds in the country, and the primary victims of the resulting environmental injustices — non-white, low income Bostonians. In this regard, this publication is too in part a defense for Weaver’s contentions — Encore Boston Harbor typifies its surroundings.

Encore Boston Harbor in Everett, MA within the Mystic River Watershed. Adapted from Mystic River Watershed Association map of Mystic River Watershed, 2019.

The Mystic River Watershed is a distinct land area in Greater Boston. Steven Kolmes, Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Portland, provides a helpful description of the significance of watershed management within developed regions—

Within any geographic region there are areas whose topography determines that they share the same stream and river drainage for precipitation running downhill towards the ocean. Such drainage basins are often referred to as watersheds. Within a watershed a number of distinctive biological communities may exist, as in the common pattern where grassy uplands give way to forested riparian zones along rivers, but these are bound together by a common flow of life's most fundamental molecule... Urban growth challenges watersheds around the world, as mega-cities place huge demands on watersheds that are no longer sufficient to meet increasing needs of growing populations... Watershed level thinking is crucial, as the consequences of alterations to one part of a watershed will inevitably reverberate throughout the rest of the watershed.³

I have organized The Watershed by both geography (north to south) and by social justice construct, as these topics are inextricably linked. The twenty-two communities that are partly or wholly a part of the watershed have remarkable variability between one another with regard to their residents’ income, race, language, and religion. These disparities align disturbingly with the ecological distinctions of the communities, as well as the expected long-term health of their residents. With the outflow of the Mystic River Watershed positioned at its southern end, the accumulation of biochemical waste is most noticeable in the cities closest to the harbor—for citizens with the fewest alternative living options available to them.

Towns and Cities of Greater Boston⁴

There are avenues to work towards building a more equitable home for all residents of the Watershed. These residents include all humans, but also all other life along the Mystic River. To create a sustainable, humane future for everyone, it is critical to examine the consequences of our collective histories.

Green Marker for Encore Casino in Everett, MA.⁵

---

Part 1: Marshland to Metropolis

Contents

Encore Boston Harbor overlooks the Mystic River, just upstream from where the river meets the Charles River on its way to the Boston Harbor. The Mystic River is the primary outflow of all water in the Mystic River Watershed — an area of approximately 76 square miles, or roughly 1% of the land area in Massachusetts.⁶

The watershed partially or wholly encompasses twenty-two communities north and west of Boston. Its headwaters originate primarily in the Aberjona River, which flows through the suburbs of Woburn and Winchester before reaching the Mystic Lake. The upper Mystic Lake flows into the Mystic River, which flows through Arlington, Somerville, Medford, Everett, Chelsea, Charlestown, and East Boston before discharging to Boston Harbor.⁷

Map of Mystic River⁷

Land degradation — a decline in land quality caused by human activities — is widespread in the Mystic River Watershed. It is not possible to find a parcel of land fully undisturbed by the region’s centuries of settlement and land redevelopment. The land invariably has been tilled, landscaped, excavated, blasted, built upon, or otherwise restructured at some point in the past.

Land degradation results from mismanagement of land and thus deals with two interlocking, complex systems: the natural ecosystem and the human social system⁸. In The Watershed, I explore the interactions historically between these two systems within the Mystic River Watershed, while referencing various related environmental justice related events, research, politics, and regulation in the United States more broadly.

---

The First Law of Ecology: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else. The Second Law of Ecology: Everything Must Go Somewhere. The Third Law of Ecology: Nature Knows Best. The Fourth Law of Ecology: There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

–         Barry Commoner⁹

---

Land Making

Boston’s land area includes more than 5,000 acres of man-made land — more than any other American city (except perhaps San Francisco, where the landfill hasn’t been comprehensively totaled).⁴ Boston’s man-made land was not the product of a single concerted effort to expand the city limits, but rather a multitude of unrelated land creation efforts over the centuries, each with its own motivations.^A

More often than not, the original fill used to create this land included contents that today would be deemed inarguably toxic to surrounding natural ecosystems. Pollutants were especially present in bodies of water known as mill ponds — manmade bodies of still water formed from building dams to reroute flowing water through a mill wheel for power. Early city ordinances would encourage, if not outright mandate that abandoned mill ponds be treated as landfills. Boston city records from as early as 1656 document the zoning of one of the city’s mill ponds as a site designated to deposit particularly noxious refuse, such as ‘beast entrails’ disposed of by butchers —

 Retrieved from Documents of the City of Boston,1878¹⁰ 

This was a standard practice in the developing city. National Geographic tells the story of Greater Boston’s largest mill pond, near what is today Haymarket Square—

In the 1640s, a group of businessmen got permission from the city to build a dam across the mouth of a cove on the northern end of the peninsula, so that they could use the tides to power some flour mills. The dam formed what was known as Mill Pond, and the mills were up and running by the end of the decade. But they were never very productive, and the whole operation was sold off to another group by the end of the 18th century.

 The new mill owners closed the floodgates on the west end of the dam, which reduced flow along the banks of Mill Pond. Consequently, sewage, garbage, and the rotting corpses of discarded animals began to accumulate along the shore. It’s unclear whether letting the filth build up was part of their plan, but the new owners soon began lobbying the city to let them fill in the pond and sell off the land.⁵

Indeed, for many of these projects, little mind was paid to the quality of the fill itself. The land from this dam today helps support the traffic along Causeway Street, and the land on the site of the former pond itself would at the time be known as Bullfinch Triangle. A new building was promptly constructed on the filled land to house the delightfully titled organization, The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians⁶

 

Highlighted triangle marking Bullfinch Triangle added to 1891 map of Boston¹¹

Independent of the environmental consequences, the man-made land quickly proved to be ill suited for urban infrastructure. The first ‘made’ land involved dumping sand and gravel on top of Boston’s mud flats, quickly leading to the realization that heavy structures could not be constructed on top of it.

By the turn of the 20th century, city planners had adopted a new strategy for building on the loosely packed land. Laborers would drive wood pilings — essentially vertical logs about the size of telephone poles — through the filled land and underlying organic silt layer (the original mud flats), 15 to 20 feet below existing ground surface¹².

The estimated 1630 Boston shoreline, overlying a 1999 satellite map of Boston and surrounding areas^12,13

The wood-piling method of building on top of wetlands introduced new problems for the city as it grew. While the method can be structurally reliable for centuries if left undisturbed, it requires that the groundwater level at no point dips below the tops of the wood pilings. Wood rots at a much slower rate when submerged in environments low in oxygen, and groundwater has markedly lower oxygen levels than water on the surface. As long as the groundwater level never dipped below the tops of the submerged wood pilings, the pilings could theoretically remain sturdy for generations¹⁴.

Unfortunately, like m