The Lid Park
A structural deck park, privately funded, free to the neighborhood — a small civic lid on top of the remediated site.
Read the letter and commit →
The park sits on top of something new.
Cambridge decides what that something is.
We’re organizing East Cambridge for the Lid Park — a privately funded deck park layered on top of the city’s remediation. If 500 neighbors sign the conditional commitment, we deliver the coalition letter to Cambridge City Council. Four other structural proposals are also drafted; if their coalitions form, we carry those letters too.
Read the Lid Park letter →Why now
In late 2025, soil samples taken across Gold Star Mothers Park in East Cambridge came back with concentrations of PCBs, lead, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that were not close to residential standards. They were multiples. In some places, orders of magnitude. The Cambridge Department of Public Works published the full results in its 2025 Table 2 soil testing report, fenced the tot lot with a protective fabric barrier in March 2026 after approval from EPA and MassDEP, and began planning a full excavation of the contaminated soil across the rest of the park.
- PCBs 68× the residential standard 68 mg/kg peak / 1 mg/kg RCS-1
- Lead 41× the residential standard 8,200 mg/kg peak / 200 mg/kg RCS-1
- Benzo(a)pyrene 175× the residential standard 350 mg/kg peak / 2 mg/kg RCS-1
Source: City of Cambridge Department of Public Works, Table 2 — Additional Soil Testing Data, 2025.
The city’s plan is good, and this page is not a critique of it. Cambridge has appropriated approximately $10 million for a full excavation of the contaminated soil under federal PCB remediation rules. Groundwater samples collected in November 2025 tested below every applicable standard, which means the primary risk is direct soil contact — and that is exactly the risk the excavation is designed to eliminate. The tot lot is already behind an engineered barrier. The rest of the park is next.
What the city is doing answers one question: how to get the poison out of the ground. It does not answer the second, larger question: what should be built on top of the remediated site when the dig is done. The post-excavation park is the largest single-site civic decision East Cambridge will make in a generation. Whatever goes there will shape the block for fifty years. The time to have that conversation is while the hole is still open.
The opening
The park will sit on top of something. The city’s default plan is grass and a playground on fresh fill, and that work is already moving. We’re organizing for something more: a privately funded deck park layered above the remediation, dedicated to the neighborhood the same way the existing Cambridge parks are. That is the proposal we are putting our name to. Four other structural proposals are also drafted — a learning lab, a community market, a biotech hub, a dog park in the sky — and if their coalitions form, we deliver those letters to City Council too. None of the proposals replaces the city’s work. All of them come after it.
When 500 neighbors sign, we deliver the coalition letter to City Council.