The city of Pawtucket, after years of neglect, closed Morley Field, an athletic field in the Woodlawn neighborhood in 2022. For three years the community, led by local office holders and residents, has fought to get the park reopened. The struggle continues via rallies, cleanups, attendance at public hearings, press releases, and contacts with various public officials.

The Woodlawn neighborhood is considered an environmental justice (EJ) neighborhood by any measure. Residents are mostly people of color, and the per capita income is lower than state and city averages. There are plenty of kids. It is subject to pollution from Interstate 95, has many old manufacturing facilities as well as modernized facilities. It continues to lose parks.

The southern end of Pawtucket borders Providence and heading north into Pawtucket, both Main Street and Pawtucket Avenue are bordered by industrial facilities or former industrial facilities. One block north of the city line, west of Main Street, extending most of the way down the hill toward the Moshassuck River, sits the former Microfibers factory site, which was abandoned by Microfibers about 10 years ago, and has sat vacant since.

Between Microfibers and the river sits Morley Field, an athletic field that was created through a gift of land to the city by Mr. Morley and the purchase of a brownfield using money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, now administered by the National Park Service, about 50 years ago. State law prohibits the closing and sale of parks that were donated to a city or town. And federal law says only under extreme circumstances can a municipality abandon and sell a park obtained with LWCF money. Closing parks without official permission is prohibited.

Pawtucket has closed or abandoned, all without express permission of the NPS, four parks in the past 20 years (at least two in Woodlawn and all in EJ neighborhoods) that were obtained with LWCF money, and assumed it could just do it again. 

Pawtucket simply just stopped maintaining Morley Field years ago, and did a little arm wrestling with local community groups that used to use the park to get them to leave so it could say no one was using it and therefore we can abandon it. Essentially, it kicked them out and said use another park. So they did, but it hurt. And the group with no alternatives, the neighborhood kids and young adults playing pickup games of soccer, have nowhere to go, with the nearest fields being over the tallest hill in town and in the richest, whitest neighborhood in the city.

It gets way more complicated, as what the city wants to do is sell the park so it can be the parking lot for the redeveloper of the Microfibers site (cue Joni Mitchell). What has held up the whole production, beyond the absolute prohibition on selling the donated half of the park, is that we have convinced the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management not to issue a wetland permit for the construction of the parking lot until all of the approvals from the National Park Service are completed, and also that they needed to hold public hearings in the community to see if the community approved.

Three years later, Pawtucket still doesn’t have a real application in to the NPS, but the old factory is gone (mostly), leaving lots of debris, and the developer has decided to hand the project off to another developer since the economic conditions keep changing, thanks to the orange-headed idiot in the White House.

The are many problems with this effort at redevelopment, some of them related to the park, and some related to the type of facility proposed.

First of all, it is really stupid if you are redeveloping a neighborhood to eliminate the parks. Parks probably do more to help a neighborhood than anything else, with study after study demonstrating this effect. What is especially dumb about eliminating this park is that it’s the last park left in the neighborhood and it is the only public place in the entire city with access to the Moshassuck River, even though the river runs from the northern edge of Pawtucket all the way to the southern city line. The river is also getting some infrastructure work that will dramatically improve water quality.

The city, led by the mayor, has repeatedly lied about what they were doing, been very fast and loose with their paperwork, and absolutely refused to listen to the people in the neighborhood trying to save the park. A perfect example is that other than at Pawtucket City Council meetings, there has been one public meeting in the neighborhood about the park. This occurred after the community group, Save Morley Field, had pointed out that the city absolutely could not sell the donated section of the park, so the city proposed a “compromise.” They would only sell half the park for a parking lot and would redevelop the other half as a passive park instead of an athletic field and maybe provide access to the river through a paper street at the end of Moshassuck Street.

To test public opinion on the new proposal the city conducted an online poll. The results were one person supported closing the park, while at least 75 opposed it. The city refused to share the poll until a reporter filed a Freedom of Information request. The city then denied the poll had any validity because the comments were all saying keep the park open and the city only wanted comments about the new design for a much smaller park.

Shortly after the phony poll, a meeting at the Woodlawn Neighborhood Association was held to do a dog-and-pony show about the reconfigured park that the community had rejected. The mayor didn’t appear, simply sending his consultants, not even any city officials. The consultants knew absolutely nothing about the controversy surrounding the closing of the park, and just were going to talk about the particulars of the design of the revamped park. And they were not going to let anyone talk to the entire assembled citizenry, about 20 people. They wanted to have individual conversations with us about the particulars. We absolutely said NO. We insisted on holding a public hearing. Every person in the room got to speak to everyone and every person said we do not want to talk about a reconfigured park, we want an athletic field.

Then we talked to the consultants individually and found out they knew nothing about the community or the community attachment to the athletic field. A couple of days later, the city sent out a press release and it ended up in the paper. The press release said it was a great meeting and everyone loved the new design. A flat-out lie with no acknowledgement that the meeting was unanimous in condemnation of the city’s plan.

Osprey have nested at the park, on top of a light tower, for at least five years. I have made videos of the osprey on the nest, of the young, of adults feeding them, each year for the past five years, so it is indisputable that the birds are nesting at Morley field.

When the city filled out paperwork for the NPS, they stated that no osprey use the park. You would think such a flat-out lie, especially one that is so easily proven, should have been enough to get the application tossed. Heck, DEM has the nest at Morley Field on its list of monitored osprey nests. But no agency at either the state or the NPS is willing to put the hammer down on the liars. The egregiousness of how Pawtucket has acted has allowed several mainstream environmental organizations to put some time and effort into the work to save the park, much welcomed by the activists, but even with Save The Bay, Audubon Society of Rhode Island, and the Conservation Law Foundation helping, we have not gotten through the wall.

The city, after having the park chewed up so the developers could see what lies underneath so they could plan for a stormwater system for the entire project, closed the park with no notice to the community. The park was unusable due to the rocks strewn all about from the testing. But what the city announced was that the park was closed due to contamination.

I am sure the park is contaminated; after all it is built on fill on a brownfield and before being built up probably flooded. (The park is now raised up about 15 feet above the river, so it no longer floods but there is a lot of fill next to the river.) But the claim of contamination was totally bogus in that one of our volunteers, following proper protocols, though doing it himself, tested the soil at Morley Field and several other parks in old industrial neighborhoods in Pawtucket. The results were pretty clear, while contaminated, Morley Field was no more contaminated than any of the other parks, and they were still open.

We may not have run a perfect campaign, none of the activists working on the project really had the time to do door-knocking or other techniques for organizing big turnouts, but we held a series of rallies that had 70 to 100 people, and consistently turned out people for City Council and planning hearings, and were just ignored by the city. We met several times with DEM and while they really understood how much of an egregious environmental justice violation the city was trying to pull off, they never could commit to stopping the project as an EJ violation.

We tried forever to reach the National Park Service to discuss the process by which a community group could object to a city closing a LWCF-funded park. Occasionally, the NPS would respond to a letter, but never once, for any of the activists, did they ever respond to followup letters with actual questions for them to answer. As far as we could tell there really is no actual process for community groups to intervene and point out how badly a city is messing up in closing a park. The law says it shall be difficult to close an LWCF-funded park, but we could find no evidence that cities and towns were ever denied permission to close a park, nor that there was any process or place of intervention for community groups to be heard. To try to break through we specifically asked one of our U.S. senators and our local congressional representative to get us a meeting with the NPS, to no avail.

But the real measure of this is that almost no one at the city or the developer ever saw the reality that the neighborhood group had a good case to show that the city was stealing and that legally and morally the park ought to be restored, and that maybe the developers would be better served by a design that restored the park and found other parking. They thought they could wait us out, but considering that every study ever done showed that good parks really support neighborhoods, they should have seen it coming, and once resistance came, returned the park to us.

It is misguided development based on a foundation of environmental racism. The stealing of parks from low-income Black and brown neighborhoods, and telling the kids to cross the biggest hill in town through the richest, whitest part of the city to get to the park, with the danger that poses to Black and brown teenagers, is just so typical of what Pawtucket and many other cities have done.

Save Morley Field has always held to the idea that if we could get a fair, honest hearing in front of the National Park Service that it would automatically stop the NPS from approving, but after years of effort we have become convinced that the NPS has no rules for how a community group could object to a city doing this and have taken a very lax approach to approvals. And yet we persist despite a new federal administration that wants to eliminate environmental protections, any thinking about how ecological healing actually helps communities develop, and any thinking about environmental justice.

Providence is not a perfect role model, but the things that Pawtucket is trying to do in this case would never have happened next door in Providence. Providence is twice the size and population of Pawtucket, but with similar demographics. Because of public activism over the years, Providence now has a Racial and Environmental Justice Commission and a Sustainability Commission. The Providence City Council is also much more independent of the mayor, even though in both cities all of the council members and the mayors are members of the same party. Development projects get much more public scrutiny, environmental justice is looked at up-front, and Providence is quite aware that they cannot sneak things by while ignoring the law.

Pawtucket, and many other communities, would be wise to pay more attention to the community and to justice and set up some institutions to point the city in the right direction when it goes astray. The economic results, as well as the environmental outcomes, will be much more favorable.

Greg Gerritt is the founder/executive director of the Friends of the Moshassuck.