mystic river, 2026

river as edge, blurred edge as restoration

The mystic river is one of the largest watersheds in Boston. Up until the last few hundred years, it was a dynamic estuary; an important settlement, source of fish and materials, a transit hub in a world where it was water that made the land legible. 

CHANGE 1903 to 1909





 

 

In 1909, a set of locks were built at the mouth of the river. The ocean tides that for 10,000 years flooded the salt marshes twice a day were cut off from the freshwater flows. An estuary became a freshwater delta.

With Industrialization, the river transitioned from hub to edge. Hundreds of shipyards, workshops, and factories pressed in. ‘Unproductive’ marshes were drained, riverbanks straightened.

By the latter half of the 20th century, the river was extremely polluted. Efforts were made to replace the remaining industry on its banks. Big box development, parking, and housing were built in its place. The river became cleaner but problems remained.

The permeable marshland that used to drain, filter, and store rain runoff and storm surge has now been replaced by impermeable surfaces. With sea level rise and warmer oceans drawing hurricanes northward, extreme flooding in the region has become a matter of when, not if. 

The banks of the river are poorer, more isolated, and subject to climate extremes beyond just flooding; more limited shade cover in the rivers environs results in summer extremes several degrees warmer than the wealthier nearby city of Cambridge. And though these communities are adjacent to one of the great environmental resources in the city, you wouldn’t know it to be there.


MYSTIC PHOTO

Crossing the Mystic is like crossing a void, and getting down next to the water is even more isolating. The river that was the regional superhighway of the native Massachusett people is now a disruption in the smooth transition from urban to suburban, bordered by the regional interstate highway of the people of Massachusetts. 

TRIM RIGHT SIDE

A return to a noble pre-colonial Eden is of course an illusion and somewhat demeaning. But then what can be done in the current context? Well, what actually is already being done that is: the city of Boston, the Mystic River Watershed Association, among others, are thinking holistically about the environmental future of the city in the face of extreme weather.

This research is broad and robust, but part of the efforts are around simply restoring wetland environments and an ecological benefit, a sponge for storm water, a natural filter for pollution, and an experiential and social benefit for the adjacent communities. Most of these efforts are further upstream, but this proposal for the next five years is similarly simple: restore already low-lying,
marginal land back to marsh, with limited removal of underutilized development.

SKETCH HERE

TRIM GREEN BIT RIGHT SIDE

The next step is more dramatic—but still very much within the realm of immediate action: Far more extensive removal of impermeable development, especially big box retail and parking, allows for the restoration of large swaths of former marshland, as well as for the meandering of the main channel of the river and the reestablishment of smaller tributaries that have long been buried or otherwise constrained.

It also involves the rerouting and raising on piers of various roads, so as to make the marshland more continuous. This level of intervention massively expands the freshwater marsh biome, increasing species diversity and ecosystem resilience. It also dramatically increases the flood storage capacity of this section of the watershed, greatly reducing the amount of damage in extreme storm events

MOVE SOME TEXT IN 50 YEARS UP HERE

CHANGE 25 TO 50 YEARS

At first glance, this intervention looks extreme: extensive demolition, routing a highway into a new tunnel, and restoring the river to a tidal state--and all in fifty years? It is important to remember, however, that the transformation of the river from an estuary to its present state only took about fifty years. And though the projects involved here would entail huge costs, these would still pale in comparison to the lifetime costs of the damaged caused by storm events.
Broadly, this is a debt-calculus societies are now having to make: do we fund expensive and extensive projects now, or defer these payments to future generations, who will pay with the accumulated interest of inaction, just to restore the status quo?
Current projections see the overtopping of the locks holding back the ocean in the next ten to twenty years. Overtopping (or water simply going around the dam) would likely put the dam out of commission for at least months, during which the communities bordering the river would flood twice a day, every day, as the tide came in. 
The strategy of holding back nature is a brittle approach that holds fast until a stochastic collapse.  
Restoration would, in comparison, be slow and stepwise. Communities would need to be engaged in the decisions to change, and in places, to retreat. Ecosystems would need to be slowly transitioned from freshwater back to estuarine. 
However, in addition to the environmental security and biosystem regeneration, restoring the mystic estuary would reorient it towards a place in and of itself, and not just an edge. 
The value to bordering communities can and probably should not be calculated, as quantification belittles the joy of dip on a summer day, the chance to catch and eat a fish fresh from your backyard, or simply momentarily stepping away from the hustle into a pocket of wading birds, dragonflies, reeds, and flowing water.