Magazine Beach is a 15-acre park in Cambridge, Mass. Sandwiched between the Charles River and Memorial Drive, in the shadow of the Boston University bridge, the park is home to a public pool, a nationally renowned boat club, pick-up soccer fields, a fitness area, the historic Powder Magazine building, and more. It was also once a popular public beach, where locals swam in the Charles.
When locals noticed that the historic Powder Magazine building was falling into dangerous disrepair a few years ago, they began a campaign to revitalize the park — fixing up existing buildings, improving the public pool, repairing broken benches, and improving the landscape plan.
As part of a course I’m taking at MIT during my fellowship year, I went to a community meeting to see how the plan is taking shape: if public meetings like these will shape the new plan, who shows up at them, and what do they want? Implicit in this question for me was also the reverse: who’s not there, and whose voices aren’t being heard in the planning process?
Meet the people who attended the meeting, hear what they had to say, and see what you think.
