What is the future for the Peace Garden?

How the Peace Garden started and what it means to Egleston Square

The Egleston Square Peace Garden originally began in the 1990's, when our community organized to address youth violence, disinvestment and neglect in the neighborhood

Clear Channel Outdoor has owned this property and operated a billboard there for decades, back from when the elevated T ran through Egleston. Around 1998, youth from Greater Egleston High School and neighbors organized to clean up their littered vacant lot and transform it into a garden. People involved in these early efforts included Will Morales, Beatriz Zapater, Roberto Chao, Robert Pulster, Alvin Shiggs, and our newly elected District 6 City Councilor Kendra Hicks.

Clear Channel leased the land for free to ESAC Boston from 2003-2018 before allowing the lease to expire. ESAC is now more focused on children and seniors and no longer involved with the Egleston Peace Garden. 

From 1998 through June 2021, at various times, hundreds, if not thousands of youth, residents, regulars, merchants, and community organizations tackled Egleston Square’s biggest absentee landlord problem by making it into a DIY park. We volunteered and fundraised to make it better, to make it the kind of clean and safe community green space that seems so ubiquitous in more affluent neighborhoods. 

Youth planted the first trees and shrubs and designed the layout that (mostly) still exists. Probably every other person who has lived, hung out, or worked in “Eggie” for any length of time has raked leaves, shoveled snow, picked up trash, or planted flowers in the Peace Garden at least once. Most recently, we planted sunflowers, daffodils, lilies, lavender, astra, and hosta. 

Image credit Suzanne Hinton

People organized big cookouts and small festivals in the Peace Garden. Neighbors ate arroz, habichuela and pernil off paper plates there. Old guys played dominoes. Students from Northeastern University designed and built an ADA-compliant stage with a wheelchair ramp in 2017. Artists from Boston, Hartford, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic performed jazz, son, samba, R&B, hip hop, forró, and spoken word on that stage.

DJs played bachata, salsa, merengue at Peace Garden clean-ups. Sometimes we just blasted Romeo Santos, Bad Bunny and the Eagles off bluetooth speakers while we pulled weeds. 

We had the annual Christmas Tree lighting with caroling and hot chocolate, and the Mayor always came. We organized and had community meetings there, summer film screenings, artistic experiments, a Poetry Block Party in 2016, children’s storytimes. In the Peace Garden we read aloud together from Gabriel García-Marquez, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison. Students learned there by organizing games, building a stage, putting down mulch, planting flowers, creating art installations. 

For months at a time, former ESMS Executive Director Luis Cotto and Rosana Rivera, ESMS board member and owner of Latino Beauty Salon, worked with neighborhood regulars to pick up trash in the park almost every single day.

Working toward a long-term solution, 2019-2021

Community health and housing problems have worsened across U.S. cities in recent years. We saw this playing out in the Peace Garden. Small businesses and neighbors complained often about unsafe activities in the park. Starting in 2019, Egleston Square Main Street and members of Egleston Square Neighborhood Association coordinated regularly with agencies who provide services and do outreach daily and weekly to people who spend a lot of time in the park: Pine Street Inn, BPD Street Outreach, Arbour Counseling, PAARI, the Department of Neighborhood Development Homelessness services, and the Boston Public Health Commission.

Merchants advocated for the City to assume a role in keeping the property clean and safe. Then-Mayor Marty Walsh promised support from Public Works at a community meeting in July 2019, but in practice this did not pan out.

With support from COGDesign, both ESAC and Egleston Square Main Street facilitated community redesign processes from 2013-2018 that yielded concept designs for renovations and safety improvements. The community hoped to secure Community Preservation Act Funds to finally renovate the park.  That funding required cooperation from Clear Channel in the form of a 15-year-lease renewal since their 10-year lease with ESAC expired in 2018.

In the summer of 2019, ESAC invited Clear Channel to Egleston Square to join us in community problem-solving. Staff at the City of Boston's Community Preservation (CPA) program and State Representative Liz Malia got involved. At a meeting at the State House in September 2019, a Clear Channel representative voiced a commitment to enter into a new 15-year lease with ESAC. 

CPA staff encouraged us to apply for funds, and in May 2020 the City of Boston awarded (but did not yet disburse) ESAC, Egleston Square Main Street, and Greater Egleston High School $150,000 to renovate the Egleston Square Peace Garden and implement safety and usability improvements. This represented a huge victory for the Square. 

Egleston Square Main Street also continued to organize programming and regular cleanups. To spur economic recovery from Covid-19 and address public health issues, we also secured a Resurgent Places Grant from MassDevelopment for temporary improvements and placemaking interventions (La Isla in the Egleston Square Peace Garden), and installed artist-designed domino tables, picnic tables, trash receptacles, COVID-19 safety signage, and lighting in the fall of 2020.

Receipt of the CPA funds still hinged upon a new 15-year lease with Clear Channel.  ESAC, meanwhile, had shifted strategic priorities to services for seniors and youth and discontinued its role in the project. From 2020-2021, Egleston Square Main Street convened a more robust Peace Garden partnership composed of Greater Egleston High School, Urban Edge, and Boston Food Forest Coalition to move forward with the CPA project. 

The team developed a comprehensive new lease agreement that would satisfy requirements for disbursement of CPA funding and granted greater legal protections to all parties. 

After several months of conversations in the spring and summer of this year, Clear Channel leadership informed us that the company's attorneys would not allow them to enter into a lease due to liability concerns. 

We also proposed to Clear Channel a number of community partnership scenarios to support revitalization efforts and increase their engagement with the neighborhood. Clear Channel Outdoor asserts that due to financial impacts sustained during the pandemic, they are not in the position to sponsor community-organized maintenance or pay for the level of maintenance required to keep the property in its previous condition. 

We then set up meetings between Clear Channel and Boston Food Forest Coalition, a community land trust, to which they could potentially donate the land--which would have made the park eligible for CPA funding. 

Clear Channel seriously considered donating the land and had their property appraised. It came to light that the warehouse at 100 School Street behind the Peace Garden was sold by Carlysle Engineering to City Realty for $2M over the summer. This means that the property at 3127 Washington Street is worth much, much more than the $179,600 at which it is valued on the tax rolls. With this knowledge in hand, national Clear Channel leadership would or could not sign off on donation of the land, and briefly put it on the market toward the end of 2021.

Without a lease or ownership, the site became ineligible for capital improvements with CPA funds. The City could not disburse the $150K that was awarded in 2020, and Peace Garden renovations could not be completed.

Egleston Square Main Street is obligated by its mission and its funders to direct resources to address a number of community needs, which have also increased substantially since the pandemic. Without a lease, legal authorization to manage the property, or resources from the property owner, the Egleston Square community simply lacks the resources to continue maintaining a property that it does not own. 

Many of us in Egleston are curious about how this situation might have played out in a more affluent neighborhood or Main Street district, or whether it would even exist at all.

From 2021-2022, Friends of the Egleston Square Peace Garden continued to meet, advocate, and organize for the Peace Garden property to be transferred to the City of Boston . A petition circulated by Egleston Square Neighborhood Association accumulated over 500 signatures.

An Egleston Square small business owner organized a Parranda for the Peace Garden at the 1st Annual Night of Churros + Chocolate in Egleston Square in December 2021, led by musician Jorge Arce and attended by then-State Representative Liz Malia and Peace Garden supporters. Neighborhood artists created installations on the chain-link fence the property owner installed around the park. The struggle for our little park got press coverage at a number of local media outlets, including The Boston Globe, Boston.com, The Boston Herald, and Channel 7 News.

Soon the Friends began conversations with cabinet-level leadership of the City of Boston’s Environment, Engineering, and Open Space. We began to work in partnership with the City. We secured commitments of funding towards programming and renovation from local donors. We also secured $10,000 in funding from the Anita L. Mishler Foundation towards continued organizing and outreach.

The Friends of the Egleston Square Peace Garden asked Clear Channel, who was now in conversations with the City of Boston, to take the property off the market, and they did. We kept awareness of the Peace Garden alive through social media and events like Night of Storytelling for the Egleston Square Peace Garden in June 2022.

Fast forward to January 2023 to find out:

What’s Next For the Egleston Peace Garden?