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.
Celeste LeCompte 
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