Who is standing up with their neighbors.

Write your own letter

These are draft letters in three different voices. They are not attributed to any real person. If one of them sounds like the letter you would write, copy it, replace the bracketed placeholders with your own details, and send it to Cambridge City Council. The placeholders [Your name], [Your East Cambridge block or street], and [Your affiliation, if any] are intentional — replace them with your own information, not with invented names.

1. Resident voice

   Draft letter — from a Cambridge resident

   Dear Cambridge City Council,

   I am a neighbor of Gold Star Mothers Park. I have walked past the fence around the tot lot every week since it went up in March. I want to thank the City of Cambridge for acting quickly on the tot-lot barrier and for the plan to excavate the rest of the park. I know this is hard and expensive work. I know the city did not choose to inherit the 1963 fire debris that sits under the park, and I know the staff of the Department of Public Works have been doing their jobs.

   I am writing because I want to ask the Council to take one more step beyond the excavation. When the dig is done, the city will own a cleaned piece of ground in the middle of a dense neighborhood that needs every civic parcel it can get. The default — a new grass park and playground — is a good default, and I do not want anyone to hear me criticizing the default. I am asking the Council to make sure the neighborhood is part of the conversation about whether the post-excavation site should carry a larger civic ambition, like the structural park and learning-lab proposals that neighbors are signing onto at thebiglid.org.

   I am one neighbor. I am sending this with 500 others.

2. Public-health voice

   Draft letter — from a public-health voice

   Dear Cambridge City Council,

   I write as someone who works in community public health in this city. I want to be clear about three things before I make a request.

   First: the city's excavation plan is the right public-health answer to the contamination profile at Gold Star Mothers Park. The primary risk pathway is direct soil contact, the groundwater tests have come back clean under November 2025 sampling, and the $10 million excavation under federal PCB rules removes the source of the risk. I do not want any part of this letter read as a critique of the excavation. The city's plan is the plan I would ask for.

   Second: the public-health story of this parcel does not end when the soil is clean. Neighbors who lived near the park for years have legitimate questions about legacy exposure that the excavation itself does not answer. Long-term screening, voluntary monitoring, and a stable community health presence in East Cambridge would do real work for a real population.

   Third: the post-excavation use of the site is a public-health decision, not just a parks decision. A learning lab on the site, an ongoing community health screening program, and a visible civic presence are choices that keep the neighborhood in conversation with its own history instead of paving over it.

   I ask the Council to treat the proposals gathering signatures at thebiglid.org as a legitimate community-health input into the post-excavation plan.

3. Preservation and civic voice

   Draft letter — from a preservation/civic voice

   Dear Cambridge City Council,

   I am writing as a neighbor who cares about the civic character of East Cambridge and the way this block of Gore Street has carried the neighborhood’s history since long before any of us lived here. Gold Star Mothers Park is small. It is also one of the last places in the district where the layered history of the waterfront — the filled tidal flat, the meatpacking era, the 1963 fire, the 1968 dedication to the mothers of fallen servicemembers — is still legible to the people who walk past it.

   I want to thank the Council and the Department of Public Works for taking the excavation seriously. Removing the contamination is the precondition for every other civic choice the city might make about this parcel. I am not asking anyone to slow the dig or to divert funding from it.

   I am asking the Council to treat the post-excavation use of the site as a civic question worth a real public process. A standard grass park is a good default and may turn out to be the right answer. The point of The Big Lid campaign is not to override the default. It is to give neighbors a way to say, together, that there are larger civic possibilities — a structural lid park, a community market, a learning lab — that belong in the conversation alongside the default, and that those possibilities deserve a hearing while the hole is still open.