By Adam Swift
One of the Boston Parks Department’s newest properties has a long history as a focal point of the Egleston Square neighborhood.
In June, the city officially acquired the Egleston Square Peace Garden from Clear Channel Outdoors to renovate and redesign the property for the use of residents in perpetuity.
It was the culmination of a long road for the Friends of the Egleston Square Peace Garden, neighbors, and JP residents.
The Egleston Square Peace Garden originally began in the 1990s, when the community organized to address youth violence, disinvestment and neglect in the neighborhood.
Clear Channel Outdoor owned the 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 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.
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.
In Mayor Michelle Wu’s State of the City address last year, it was good news for the friends of the peace garden as she said, “We worked alongside residents in Egleston Square and business partners to secure a Community Peace Garden on Washington Street.”
Pulster said the Peace Garden has been sustained by community groups for over 20 years after Clear Channel leased the property for $1 to the community nonprofit ESAC. He said the garden became a focal point for activities and events in the neighborhood for many years and became a beloved park in Egleston Square.
“When the news came that the city and the mayor had an interest in acquiring the land, it was just a big deal for us and we were very excited,” said Pulster. “The thing for us was that Clear Channel decided they didn’t want to redo the lease, so they put a fence around it. Then, the community activated and began to work advocating for the city to acquire the land.”
Now that the city has acquired the peace garden, Pulster said the Friends of the Egleston Square Peace Garden will be working with the city to help make the park the best asset possible for the neighborhood.
“There are many examples of friends of city parks in the city of Boston; one of them is for (Christopher) Columbus Park,” he said. “We are exploring our options now to become a more formal entity and looking at models of other community organizations that became non-profits.”
Pulster said he expects the city and the friends group to complement each other when it comes to how the park is used and maintained.
One of the major activities regarding the peace garden over recently has been the restoration and future of the six panel Peace Throughout History Mural which was originally attached to the Carlyle Engineering building abutting the park more than 20 years ago.
“We had these very large panels, a six-panel mural on the building, that were painted by youth from the Greater Egleston area under the direction of Roberto Chao, who is a local mural artist,” said Pulster. “They graced the park for nearly two decades.”
At the same time the future of the Egleston Square Peace Garden was in transition, Pulster said the building that was home to the mural went up for sale.
“We knew the murals were going to have to be taken down at some point when the building was sold,” he said.
After the sale of the building, Pulster said the community got in touch with the contractor working on the building to make sure the murals were safely down. The contractor, Global Power and Construction, was able to remove the murals and store them until the friends group was able to find another location to store the panels.
“The construction company really did us a favor because they could have been easily tossed aside at that point,” said Pulster.
The Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation gave the Friends a space where it could store the mural panels as it works to restore them.
Pulster said it has been an exciting process with a number of community volunteers working to help restore the mural.
“People see some value in the murals, and as we did, that there is some artistry there and some history that is worth preserving,” said Pulster.
Now, the group is looking for homes for the mural panels so they can be adopted and cared for in a community space, he added.
“We are in the process now of reaching out to potential homes to see if they would be interested in taking the murals and being a custodian of the murals so we can keep them in the community,” Pulster said. “We are pretty far along now in the plans to find homes for the murals.”
Looking ahead, Pulster said the parks department has an excellent history of keeping and maintaining parks for the communities.
“We’re happy to be a part of that network right now, and we see this as a beautiful green space that is available for community members to enjoy some shade in an otherwise sunny area,” he said.
Pulster said the community will work with the city to make sure that the theme of peace at the Peace Garden continues to be part of the park narrative.