Chelsea Creek Action Group

New Fence Panels Installed at Condor Street Urban Wild in East Boston! Beyond is the Hess Oil site that locals wish to convert into a salt marsh.

Chelsea Creek Action Group installed the final interpretive steel fence panel. This fence was built with NOAH's Small Grants funding and a gift from an anonymous source.

The artist for all six completed and installed fence panels was Leigh Hall, an East Boston Chelsea Creek Action Group member, and a resident of East Boston.

No Salt Marsh for East Boston, Pave and Put Up a Factory Opines the Boston Globe

The Globe Editorial "On Chelsea Creek" (Oct 4, 2010) tells East Boston no salt marsh for you and yours. Pave over the grassy waterfront site and put up a factory.  Let’s complete the industrialized concrete shore from Logan Airport through Boston Inner Harbor up the Mystic to the Amelia Earhardt dam. No marsh grass, just cribbing and cement from aviation terminal to aviator memorial.  

Chelsea Creek, located on the threshold between the Mystic River and Boston Harbor, should be vital to the health of Boston’s coastal ecosystem. Instead it is lined with oil tanks and salt piles.  Except the 7 acre Hess Oil terminal site was abandoned and is now a grassy patch on the water’s edge. For more than two decades, two generations of East Boston residents have said this should be turned back into a salt marsh.  First, they were told it would be expensive to remediate.  

Yet, the Chelsea Creek Action Group has raised over $1 million for salt marsh remediation!  Today, they are first up for funds from a $6.1 million pollution settlement paid by ExxonMobil after its Everett terminal spilled more than 15,000 gallons of fuel into the Mystic. 

Let the people have their salt marsh! We want to see snowy egrets, oystercatchers and sand pipers, ducks and ospreys.  This salt marsh at the Hess-tanker site would become a staging area for herring populations preparing to migrate up the Mystic, shelter for schools of "bait fish" avoiding striped bass and blues.  Recreational fishermen, paddlers, bird watchers, and tourists bring more money and jobs to the region than would another pint-sized (7 acres) factory. 

For blue harbor waters and a truly green economy, for goodness sake urge the Boston Globe to change their opinion on this. Call for a salt marsh for the people of Chelsea Creek and Boston’s inner harbor!

Chelsea Creek Marsh Action Write Now!

Speak out for urban coastal green and wilds.  Write a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe why even though you may be far from Boston Harbor you’d like to see a salt marsh in Chelsea Creek.  You need only write a few lines or up to 200 words. 

It is easy for people to overlook Chelsea Creek because it is behind East Boston, out of view of gentrified urban shores.  It is urgent for people who care to remind us of the national legacy of Boston Harbor’s ecosystem, and how a salt marsh serves the common good.

Chelsea Creek Marsh Action Write Now!

Tips on writing a letter to the Editor