East Cambridge · Gore Street
The Park
Gold Star Mothers Park, from the 1874 fill to the 2025 samples to the opening on the other side of the dig.
The site
Gold Star Mothers Park is a small parcel, roughly an acre and a half, on Gore Street in East Cambridge. The land is not natural. Like most of East Cambridge, it is made ground — filled in during the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, when Cambridge and Somerville piped and covered the old tidal flats and small rivers that once separated the two cities. The particular piece of land the park sits on was part of a stretch that the state formally filled in 1874 under Chapter 91, one of Massachusetts’ early environmental statutes. Before the fill went in, the site was on the edge of Miller’s River, a narrow tidal watercourse that had by then been used for decades as the working river of an industrial neighborhood.
The industry that worked the river hardest was meatpacking. Starting in 1855, the John P. Squire company built a slaughterhouse complex on the river and grew it into one of the largest pork processors in New England. When the river was filled in 1874, the plant stayed and grew. By the early twentieth century, the corner of Cambridge around Gore Street was a dense industrial block of meatpacking facilities, rendering operations, and the electrical and chemical infrastructure that ran them. On Easter Sunday 1963, the Squire complex caught fire. The plant was destroyed. The rubble and ash — grease-saturated wood, meatpacking chemistry, transformer fluid, lead paint, decades of industrial residue — was left in place and eventually covered over.
In 1968, the city received federal park funds and dedicated the site as Gold Star Mothers Park, named in honor of the mothers of American servicemembers who died in military service. The park served the neighborhood quietly for almost sixty years. It was renovated with new playground equipment and a shallow layer of clean fill in 2005 and 2006. Through all of that, the layer underneath remained what it had been in 1963: industrial debris, buried but never removed.
In late 2025, the soil samples came back.
What’s in the soil
| Contaminant | Maximum (mg/kg) | Average (mg/kg) | RCS-1 (mg/kg) | Max ÷ RCS-1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Benzo(a)pyrene CAS 50-32-8 | 350 | 12.1 | 2 | 175× |
| Phenanthrene CAS 85-01-8 | 1,100 | 26.6 | 10 | 110× |
| 2-Methylnaphthalene CAS 91-57-6 | 48 | 2.9 | 0.7 | 68.6× |
| PCBs, Total CAS 1336-36-3 | 68 | 4.8 | 1 | 68× |
| Dibenz(a,h)anthracene CAS 53-70-3 | 100 | 3.8 | 2 | 50× |
| Lead CAS 7439-92-1 | 8,200 | 512.6 | 200 | 41× |
| Benzo(a)anthracene CAS 56-55-3 | 510 | 15.2 | 20 | 25.5× |
| Acenaphthene CAS 83-32-9 | 97 | 4.1 | 4 | 24.25× |
| Naphthalene CAS 91-20-3 | 97 | 4 | 4 | 24.25× |
| Benzo(b)fluoranthene CAS 205-99-2 | 390 | 12.9 | 20 | 19.5× |
| Indeno(1,2,3-cd)pyrene CAS 193-39-5 | 240 | 7.9 | 20 | 12× |
| Acenaphthylene CAS 208-96-8 | 12 | 1.5 | 2 | 6× |
| Barium CAS 7440-39-3 | 6,100 | 343 | 1,000 | 6.1× |
| Arsenic CAS 7440-38-2 | 100 | 12 | 20 | 5× |
| Chromium CAS 7440-47-3 | 380 | 29.6 | 100 | 3.8× |
| Cadmium CAS 7440-43-9 | 210 | 13.4 | 80 | 2.6× |
| Chrysene CAS 218-01-9 | 470 | 14.6 | 200 | 2.35× |
| Zinc CAS 7440-66-6 | 1,600 | 301.6 | 1,000 | 1.6× |
| Fluoranthene CAS 206-44-0 | 1,100 | 28.6 | 1,000 | 1.1× |
The numbers describe a contamination profile that is consistent with what the site was before 1968: a filled industrial plot that caught fire during its industrial era and was never properly remediated before a public park was built on top of it. The primary exposure pathway is direct soil contact — bare hands, digging, children on the ground. Groundwater samples collected in November 2025 tested below every applicable drinking water and environmental standard, which is the single most important thing to know about the risk here: the contamination is in the soil, not in the water. That is why the city’s response has been to fence the tot lot and plan a full soil excavation, and that is why The Big Lid campaign treats the city’s plan as good.
What the city is doing
On March 23, 2026, the Cambridge Department of Public Works announced that EPA and MassDEP had approved an interim protective barrier for the tot lot — a fabric layer below the ground surface, covered by two feet of clean material — with installation expected to be complete before May 1, 2026. The full excavation of the remaining park soil is the larger and more expensive piece: approximately $10 million, planned under the federal PCB remediation framework, with EPA Region 1 and MassDEP engaged throughout. The city has published its testing results, held community meetings, and maintained public communication about the schedule.
The city’s plan is good. This page is not a critique of it.
The opening
Excavation will, eventually, give the neighborhood back a clean piece of ground. What it will not do is answer the second question: what should be built on top of that clean ground when the dig is done. The default answer is “a park” — and the default answer is an honest answer, because a clean neighborhood park is what every Cambridge block deserves. But the post-excavation site is also the largest single-site civic decision East Cambridge will make in a generation. Whatever goes there will shape the block for fifty years. The moment to have that conversation is while the hole is still open, not after it has been filled in. The Big Lid is about that conversation.
Precedents
Little Island
A structural deck park built almost entirely on private capital, operated under a long-term public license. The closest civic analog to a structural lid over the Gold Star site.
Klyde Warren Park
A deck lid over a recessed highway, run by a local conservancy. The clearest precedent for how a community-operator model for a deck park actually works day to day.
The Rose Kennedy Greenway
Not a lid but a long civic surface built on top of the Big Dig. The local political template for a neighborhood-facing civic parcel built on top of somebody else's infrastructure.
Five futures Cambridge could choose → /proposals