On October 20 and 21, 1996, a rainstorm dropped a foot of water on parts of Greater Boston. In the days that followed, a small and neglected river showed the city how much it had forgotten about it.
The water went everywhere. Route 9 in Framingham sat under two feet of it. A police officer in Revere estimated that “half” of his city was flooded, according to reports at the time. Hundreds of drivers stalled on Storrow Drive. The Head of the Charles Regatta was called off for the first time in 32 years. At Northeastern University there were reports of fish swimming in toilets. Brighton flooded, and so did Roslindale, and in the Fenway and Mission Hill the water had nowhere to drain.
“The Muddy River is completely full and the water isn’t draining out of that area,” a Boston Water and Sewer official said then. “That’s our biggest problem right now.”
A bathtub nobody cleaned
The Muddy River began as a tidal channel, at a time when the Back Bay was still a bay. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, kept one of those channels and turned it into a long, narrow park. It was finished around 1900 and looked like the English pastoral parks of its day. The river runs 3½ miles from Jamaica Pond to the Charles. Inside the Emerald Necklace park system it was supposed to work as a bathtub for the region’s rain, so that homes, shops, subways and the Museum of Fine Arts would stay dry. According to a 2020 federal presentation, 90,000 people live within half a mile of it.
For most of the twentieth century nobody maintained it. By the mid-1990s, as Danny McDonald recounts in The Boston Globe, the river was choking. An invasive reed blocked it in places, and decades of sediment had built up in a channel that was shallow and flat to begin with. In the Fenway, the river had been forced into underground pipes that were too small, under a Sears parking lot. “There was no foresight,” said Lisa Kumpf, river restoration director at the Charles River Watershed Association.
Ten feet of water at Kenmore
The flood cut portions of four branches of the MBTA’s Green Line. Kenmore Station was under 10 feet of water, one of seven subway stations put out of action. The tunnels stayed closed for six days while crews pumped them out and repaired them. The T alone spent an estimated $60 million.
The cost was predictable. Earlier in the decade, federal officials had studied flood-control improvements on the Muddy in Boston and Brookline and turned them down because they would cost too much. The 1996 damage ended up many times larger than that estimate.
Here is a reflection, not a finding: governments are seldom short of studies. They are short of the will to spend money on something that has not yet failed. Prevention has no ribbon to cut, and so the bill is usually paid afterward, in pumps and repairs.
“It was one of these things that wasn’t getting attention,” said Carol Lasky, spokesperson for the Maintenance and Management Oversight Committee, the citizen-led body that watches over the Muddy River Restoration Project. “Sometimes, it takes a fire to bring out the hoses. It gave new energy and new impact to a bunch of environmental organizations . . . to say, ‘That’s it, that’s enough.’”
Taking up the parking lot
The repair took years of permits and planning. Congress authorized the work under Section 522 of the Water Resources Development Act of 2000, with the state, Boston and Brookline as local partners. Crews replaced the culverts, improved the landscaping, removed invasive vegetation and dredged 90,000 cubic yards of sediment from the riverbed. The Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $36.5 million contract for the dredging phase in February 2020 and later marked the completion of the $38 million final phase with a ceremony. Taken together, the federal overhaul has cost more than $90 million.
The most visible change is near the Landmark Center. The Sears lot was dug up, the river was “daylighted” back into open air, and the land became green space again, as it had been before the lot. A new park opened there in 2017. Karen Mauney-Brodek, president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, put it in terms of a song about paving paradise to put up a parking lot: “It’s like the Joni Mitchell song played backwards and forwards.”
The conservancy was itself largely a product of the flood. It is a coalition that includes officials from Brookline, Boston and the state, and it works to preserve and improve Olmsted’s string of parks. The Emerald Necklace was where Olmsted “really used nature’s own systems to manage and handle water and storms and rain,” Mauney-Brodek said, and any landscape architecture class studies its design. Over the decades the group has gained political weight. Former governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis sits on its board. It has also lost fights: it opposed Mayor Michelle Wu’s plan to build a new White Stadium inside Franklin Park, the city’s largest green space, and failed to stop it.
Still the dirtiest stream
The work is not finished. The Muddy is still the most polluted stream or tributary flowing into the Charles, according to advocates. Further downstream, a project to improve Charlesgate Park near the Charles is expected to cost $180 million and to be done in the winter of 2029. The oversight committee’s own description of the project says it will need long-term maintenance.
Kumpf said the 1996 flood made Greater Boston “realize these are systems that need to be maintained.” Then, more simply: “It really catalyzed people.”