The City of Somerville hosted a community meeting on Feb. 9 about the latest design updates to the ArtFarm public park. The park’s construction is set to begin in 2027 on top of the Poplar Street pump station — a stormwater management structure currently under construction — to provide a community space for Somerville residents in the Brickbottom neighborhood.
The design of the park has already been underway for 15 years, undergoing multiple reviews and redesigns.
Luisa Oliveira, the director of public space and urban forestry commented on the lengthy project timeline during the community meeting.
“A lot of things have changed since we started talking about [Artfarm] … but what has not changed was these core values that were here at the beginning … sustainability, culture, community and development,” Oliviera said.
Challenges to funding, the pandemic and the intensifying effects of climate change over the past five years all have all contributed to delays, but designing the park to share space with the pump station has proven to be a complex challenge. The current plan aims to have the park built over the tank to combine the city service with a community space.
The pump station will send storm water into the Charles River, improving the efficiency of the sewer system and reducing flooding.
Somerville currently has a combined sewer system, something the pump station will change.
“When we’re done with this project, we’re going to have a separated sewer where the storm water goes where storms go, which is into the rivers … and the sanitary sewers go where they go, which is into a treatment plant, rather than occupying space in the treatment plant with relatively clean stormwater,” Brian Postlewaite, director of engineering for the City of Somerville and a representative of the engineering team, said.
“[The separate outlets] are critical to the longevity and sustainability of our community, and that’s only becoming more important with climate change … Somerville has a huge flooding challenge, especially in the Union Square neighborhood area,” Postlewaite added.
As plans for the park evolved over the years, city leaders were forced to rethink some of their original ideas. The city had initially envisioned building an ‘ArtBarn’ to house rotating exhibits, but ultimately pivoted away from that concept.
“We switched it a little bit so that the park itself is a canvas for art versus the barn [being] that,” Oliveira said.
Designers have found different ways to feature art throughout the park, planning to incorporate installations directly into its features and showcase work in portable galleries, tents and a series of designated “art nodes,” small hubs throughout the grounds dedicated to rotating exhibits.
Elements of the pump station tank itself will also double as canvases for art. Because the tank requires multiple access points for maintenance and inspections, there will be tank entry points throughout the park. Designers aim to incorporate artistic elements into these features.
“Those are effectively access points with a manhole cover,” Eden Dutcher, with architect group Groundview, said. “[We are] looking at opportunities to do a custom casting that can be site specific.”
The park will also include temporary art installations, trees and experiences of nature, lawns and seating for communal gatherings, fitness features and play features, among other things. It is currently designed to have a ‘loop path’ for people to run and walk on that threads through all the different areas of the park.
The park will also have a stage and covered canopy, which will be able to seat 100 people directly in front of the stage, and 350 if seating extends into the lawn.
Designers have additionally selected plants to facilitate ecological diversity within the park. They used Somerville’s pollinator action plan to determine which plants would be most environmentally suitable.
“We were pretty excited to be able to utilize the pollinator action plan that the city just published recently,” Dutcher said. “We are [using] a lot of great information from those plant lists that they generated in helping to develop a plant list that’s special for ArtFarm.”
Although construction of the actual park are being set for next year, the city is working ahead to prepare the details of the design. Alison Maurer, ecological restoration planner for Somerville’s Public Space and Urban Forestry Division, said that with the available funding, the city was working to finalize the park’s design.
“We’re working hard right now to finalize this design [and] get all the technical details worked out so that we are ready,” she said. “We have money to use, so we’re using it … so that next year we’re good to go.”
