people think of history they often think of buildings and people but the natural environment of our town is also part of our communities history our program today focuses on the belmont up lands which is one of our areas  natural places and we will learn how nature and people have interacted with each other over the years in that area and how the natural environment has changed over the years our guest speaker and marie lambert is a twenty year resident of belmont and is  belmont town meeting member ms lambert serves as the on the board of the belmont citizens forum as well as being a founding member of the belmont stormwater working group lambert is a leading force in raising awareness regarding the belmont uplands area and she conducts walking tours of the all life reservation which is near the belmont up plans in addition to her little river nature walks mislabelled has also written articles on the belmont uplands for the belmont citizens for newsletter her dedication to educating our community and promoting our plan both planning and policies regarding preservation of the environment earned her a two thousand and fourteen david r johnson preservation award from our belmont historical society please help me welcome  thank you and welcome here today amelia let me just check what is your time target for this talk just to make sure i have about an hour ok because i could go on for about twenty four days instead of twenty four hours  twenty or sixty minutes so i'm here to introduce you to the belmont uplands which some of you may have seen as millions said it has been a natural area and is barely still a natural area as many of you may have read in the newspaper articles that i've provided in the back just in the last two weeks the trees have been cut down on the buildable portion of this property and i'll be going over that but my main focus is on the longer term history of this property so what i've chosen to introduce you with is a fall so over maple leaf on top of the building plans for this property and that's what you're seeing here i'm trying to so a lot of people don't know where this is even though they hear about it in the press so i've drawn a circle i think i'm all right i've drawn a circle here as to where it is but a lot of people don't go there because there aren't a lot of a butters that bluewater body is is little pond and that big blue water body is a spy pond and spy pond actually drains and a conduit today underneath route two into little pond and i'll be going over that hydrology because i think the the changing use of land and water is the theme here so where is it it's nearest where spied upon drains into route two that's one way to think about it it's in between route two and and fresh pun fresh pond is lower down on the on the slide and everybody knows where that is in cambridge in what is today cambridge port parts of it used to be in belmont not be going over that it's kind of in a remote corner of today's belmont i don't know if you can see but those pink and dotted lines show today's boundaries of belmont and so that red circle is in a fairly remote portion of belmont it's address is on a road called acorn park drive which was established in order to allow the arthur d little company in the one nine hundred fifty s to move headquarters to that location but it's also next to a nature reservation owned by what used to be the metropolitan parks commission is now the d c are the department of conservation and recreation and that's where the nature part comes in because the wildlife don't know from boundaries of private and public property and they've been on that property from for some decades now so how would one get there there are a lot of ways to get there and there's only one that stays entirely in belmont to get to that corner of belmont and that's by canoe we're here at the library in the left hand side and i can use google maps to get to  but then i put my canoe in which i have actually done twice now and then paddle over and get to the border of the belmont uplands i could get there by bike but in order to do that from that white road location i'd have to take the the relatively new bike path over to they all life the station and then i'd have to backtrack to acorn park drive and then i'd have to take the north trail or keep compart drive to get the to the back side of that red circle like i said it's fairly remote if you're going to go by car or you could also do this by bike you'd carry on to the end across street take a ride on lake and then you take that north trail that i give walk sign in order to get to the back side of the property and you could of course take the bus or subway to alewife and then follow the directions by bike so another way to think about it is where is it if we're talking about water where is it in our watershed so we are most of belmont is in the mystic river watershed and one of the tributaries of the mystic river is the gale wife so we call the colored area on this slide the l wife brooke sub watershed every drop of water colored in here eventually gets into the wife brooke which then flows on to the mystic river and the drops of water that fall on the belmont uplands itself carry on to the new little river new as of nineteen million nine and then the little river is much bigger than today's alewife brook it flows into the  brooke and then carries along what we all know the wife brook parkway of frederick law olmsted designed parkway and then it goes the wife brook goes all the way to the mystic river which then is controlled by the amelia earhart dam in medford so just a few different ways to think about where are we talking about and what's its significance from the land and water point of view i notice that the fresh corn reservoir itself is not colored the fresh corn reservoir used to receive water from the mystic tides but then i'll be going over the  various points in time when it was blocked off but it is now blocked off and used as fresh water reservoir and so it's not considered part of the watershed because every drop the falls on fresh pond reservoir stays in fresh pond reservoir for any reason it got so high that its banks were breached then it would flow to the mystic river that used to be part of the mystic river watershed so i'm going to take you on an exciting journey and this is the entrance to the north trail which i really love to walk on though not as much as i used to our last walk or twenty five of us were there enabled us to witness the devastation of the trees that have been cut down there many of them over one foot in diameter and seventy feet high this is the three playing bridge that starts the one mile walk from a reservation area although all the way on d c our property to little pond so  my walks i do give a geology background of how the bedrock underneath our feet the deep bedrock is shared with west africa until the atlantic ocean came up and now the atlantic ocean left a lot of marine sediment that's why we have so much clay in this area and how the glaciers came in and changed the water from flowing down from the boston the scart mint to the charles river the groundwater still goes that way but when the glaciers came in and left them or rain the surface water started going towards mystic river that was all pre human times and i thought i'd say for the in the interests of time start with the first humans the native americans and go on to the early settlers in the sixteen hundreds but if any of you have questions about the geology i could answer a few about that so throughout this talk i'll have a slide like this which gives you sort of a a bulleted history of what's been happening in that century and then a whole bunch of  pictures to tell the word of a story a different way so about one uplands has always been somewhat of a hill surrounded by the great swamp and there's a book back there among the sources that i've put out on that table called the great swamp and in the seventeenth hundreds it was actually known as williams island but there's a footnote that says it's not a real island it's an island in the middle of a swamp so it's always been a as far as i can tell since since a glacial times a hill surrounded by this title great swamp and it's always been between freshman and spy pond and kind of near the other cattle ponds formed by the glaciers little pond and it is in the sixteen hundreds little little river was in a different place than it is today and i'll be going over that and both that and brook joined what was then named monotony river but  not to me river which is so named for the native american word for it is now considered part of alewife brook and these rivers were and brooks were in the swarm between fresh pond i mean between spy pond and little pond there was a natural narrow passage today it's very narrow it's in the culvert under route two but it's always been fairly narrow and it's been a great place to catch fish especially the el life on their migration every spring so the native americans call these fish and to the english ear that sounded enough like a wife a tavern mistress that they named them elway fish but it came  from and they used to camp between fresh pond and spy pond during the summers and they knew the time of when the fish would come and they would so nets and as part of their essentially subsistence farming they would they would survive on a fish would be a big part of their diet in the sixteen hundreds this was part of the colonies and king charles of england made a land grant all the way from alden to what was called on the deed the cambridge rocks the cambridge rocks are what we now know of as belmont hill so it was huge linn tract and part of that land w called the turkey swamp there are still turkeys there today but those turkeys that are there today were introduced in the one nine hundred seventy s as one of several efforts to reintroduce native wildlife after they had been  d from hunting so this was known as the turkey swamp and our first mr hill our first mr abraham hill lived in sixteen thirty five unknown this land  and this vast tract of land mainly in malden and he farmed part of it but most of it he sold off and some of it he left for his descendants to inherit so for most of the sixteen hundreds and even most of the seventeen hundreds you can see texts that refer this to this as the useless marshes there wasn't much farming you could do it was too wet and so the only thing that started to be grown there was hey end not in that great a volume it was for the horses so when they arrived and noticed the fish where is that the native americans were building the colonial lists decided that it was their turf between spy pond and little pond and one of the very first roles in the colonial town for instance in harvard was the fish the fish officer and the fish officer would regulate which farmer allowed to take fish by day of week or even by time of day eventually so the native american fish where's the what did they look like this is just an example from vancouver canada but i have to imagine that a very similar fish  at spy pond they would have to rebuild it every summer maybe some of the vertical poles would survive from one spring to the next as a map this was known as the great marshes this is a map from the sixteen thirty six and belmont uplands it's not quite on the map but you can see a lot of marshes surround it and there's fresh pond with the horizontal lines across it and so now let's go back to and see well where was this big tract of land for abraham hill number one between malden and belmont hill well there's mold in a rectangle over there so you can see there's quite a bit of land in that pink areas today is bound belmont the town of belmont in that little red circle is the belmont uplands that we're talking about so until eight hundred seventy five this was all a title march eight hundred seventy five that terribly long ago it was tight all the way to fresh pond so the waters would go up and down and alewife brook based on the tide in eight hundred seventy five for twenty five years there were title gates put in where broadway and somerville as title some water would get through in the tides but not that much in one thousand nine hundred for various reasons all go over there broadway gates were actually destroyed at midnight on new year's thousand nine hundred we think by the arlington celery farmers who really would like to irrigate their celery farms thank you very much and they knew that because of what cambridge was doing with their sewer system and the that they wouldn't get in as much trouble as they would have before they came bridge sewers were sorted out and so for nine years we were again title on this waterway so you again to control the waters and that was in place until nine hundred sixty seven for quite some time and it's where the craddock bridge is today where el wife brooke is and in one thousand nine hundred sixty six the amelia earhart dam which is still there today  replaced the cravat dam and the dam itself was destroyed the credit bridge however has been the source of some flooding challenges in not too distant past two thousand and ten because there's so  much structure associated with the old dam that it's a fairly narrow passageway and in two thousand and ten during a mother's day storm that created a lot of flooding part of it was due to the fact that somebody who's doc broke loose in the flood and got stuck couldn't make its way under the craddick bridge because of the narrow passageway and later analysis determined that it was that piece of dock stuck at the craddock bridge which was a passageway because it used to be a dam that caused most of the flooding all the way to flood route to itself near the wife to the station so that's a little history of the water and just because i saw a turkey on the land and it used to be called the turkey swamp i thought it like you know that the wild turkeys look like this if you can see and perched on the of her perched on the log she had two or three babies with her and was not happy about us crossing over that log so the hill family was actually neglecting the uplands for the seven generations shown here they held family even though this there is a hill on the uplands that's not where their name comes from their name comes from france originally development tania and then when they moved to devon england they named themselves hill and abraham hill number one i lived on a farm closer  belmont and he had a son zachary and then it gets very confusing because there are duplicate names there was abraham hill number two and this is the one who built the hill house that still stands today as  oldest homes in belmont and three eighteen pleasant street and the belmont to startle society has a great video explaining the history of that house they had a son zachariah not zachary and then there was let's look at our history and a map was drawn this map of what the early farm who the early farming families were an eight hundred fifty three and of course you'll recognize a lot of the names from our place names in our street names the belmont uplands is still that red circle you can see the name a hill underneath it that's where the hill estates are and you can see that the old little river was a far into little pond going out by that boundary with cambridge and then into the alewife brook and then over this way into the mystic river so farming life now we're going to start into the eighteen hundreds these there's a farmer bringing his goods into market and this is from a great video that i have back there that victoria has put together called experience belmont by the bellman historical society so let's jump to the eight hundreds and we actually in one nine hundred forty five start farming there's a there's a farm on the property that he was just farm for one hundred years approximately at the same time that farming begins the railroad was there so it's all about the railroad and farming during this time in the eighteen hundreds in particular the fitchburg railroad which goes quite close to the property was established in one thousand forty three and when amos is daughter lucy h howard had a really good run of it a very great award winning farm they had help from immigrant labor i'm sure who are arriving in the eighteen fifties in this area from ireland italy and french canada those immigrant laborers work not just on the farms but in the brick industry because of course there's a lot of us clay in this area and clay pit pond in front of our whole high school own high school in the clay pits in cambridge came from this era of brick building i already mentioned the broadway title gates being installed in a eighteen seventy five that would have affected the water by the farm and in eight hundred seventy nine thirty four years after being granted the land from his father in law he used to send his son only had one house one barn and one piggery according to tax records that were researched by richard betts for an article he boxes of a strawberry that he invented called the belmont and and had a windmill on the property that paid taxes because it was drawing water from from the water supply in one thousand nine hundred as i've when showing this plan for a different this map for a different purpose later on but for this purpose i just want to show you that the belmont uplands the the red circle there is surrounded by these little tufts but on the left you can see a cart path where the horses would go and you can see a lot of railroads going through and this ice tracker i mean the ice industry was one of the main motivations for the where you are affecting the ok was one of the main motivations for the railroad in the first place it was for freight and of course  t phones one that's recording and one that sample flying so i'm not going to carry two microphones  underwood wrote this he was a biologist and he wrote a piece called sanitary improvement of marshlands which was later used to dredge the new little river and i'll explain that shortly but first i'd like to show you a little bit about the farm this is not the farm but it's a drawing by winslow homer one of his first showing children doing labor instead of play and while it wasn't well it was done in a different part of belmont it it shows you sort of berry picking that's another thing that he want to wards for more and he was just shows you the trees in the background in the marshland between and this is probably what it looked like in the eighteen sixty's a map  from this graph from eight hundred ninety eight starts to show the buildings that appeared and what i was so excited one day with my just googling to find was that there was this wonderful seed packet illustrated of the belmont strawberry you could buy seeds for the the belmont and that blue banner says w houston sun originator's belmont mass and then at the top it says first introduction spring of eight hundred eighty six grown by the originators for the past four years now the belmont strawberry what was special about it a couple of things one is that it was particularly big but the main thing is that it was late blooming so when he had bring his strawberries into market everybody else's strawberries were over and so he'd have the only one anyone could buy if they so they were very proud and they had a spur off of a spur of the railroad spur for the ice industry and spy pond had a spur off of it just to this farm and they'd bring their pigs and their produce into into boston and be d on that railroad so then we have another seven generations of the houston family all started where we stopped which is amos hill on the last diagram and we talked a little bit about lucy lying castor he was known as tad eustace and he's the one who actually sold the farm in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight during the depression he had three sons none of whom were interested in farming but one of whom was robert hughes to us the reason so i'd like to introduce and asked to turn around andre and nancy and carol historical society and and also to me and a lot of the material that i've learned about the farm has been thanks to the houston's family and they've been on the nature walk now and they've seen seen the forest a month ago before it was cut down and knowing that it would soon be cut down and so that's that's i'm really glad that you could join us today moving on to the eight hundred so all about the the and the country in general is growing and we're no exception we've got a lot of name changes we've got a lot of stuff happening what we now know of as arlington was renamed it was  established at the time it was called west cambridge and it was established in one thousand seven is as an independent town but it broke apart from cambridge we've got the first financial crisis of the country in eighteen nineteen we've got the war of eighteen twelve  we've got an embargo act that's affecting trade for the farmers in this area so in the eighteen twenties there's a focus on new england on specialty crops and livestock these were special pigs for instance imported from england and we've also got a focus on landscape gardening so at this time the message is the sort of cultural society was formed in order specifically to diversify the diet of the citizenry  area little pond even was used as a nice farm in this period and we had lots of different railroads coming and this is just a generic photograph of a train going through a marsh but i think it really tells a lot of the story  t on our next slide and in eight hundred fifty nine the railroad which started to be used for passengers and not just freight was the foundation of belmont as as a railroad suburb named after one of the country estates that james o'connell talked about in a lecture last winter in one thousand and sixty seven after the civil war in recognition of arlington cemetery west cambridge was renamed as arlington and and remains the name today so this is that train going through the marsh and it's just a dinner train but if you look at as many of you i'm sure have seen these idyllic pictures of belmont as it was being founded there's always a puff of smoke for that proud train going through our town and then there's that stagecoach this again is from victoria's d v d climbing up belmont hill sometimes with the help of mr wellington's oxen and  then we even have a winslow homer etching in a magazine about the new town of belmont and again we get the big white puff of smoke from the train going through our town so this is what the map of belmont looked like in this area do you notice it going through fresh pond did you know belmont owned half of fresh pond when it was founded nine hundred fifty nine i'm sure many of you did hundred seventy five we still did there's that belmont uplands but it's not on the corner of town there's some empty way on to the right to the right of it and there's alewife brook if you got up close you could see frederick tutors ice glossy alice frederick tudor the ice king he lived in he was operating in belmont when he first established his ice kingdom sending ice all over the world however the controversy at this time was around water pollution in eighteen eighty there was a petition from the mayor of cambridge to annex enough of belmont to be able to protect their water supply because the belmont board of selectmen had a permit a slaughterhouse right next to fresh pond and they considered that a risk to the water supply so hundred eighty cambridge enix ation this is very approximate but while their main concern was getting the rest of fresh punt they took with it a lot of way and right up bordering mr hughes to says land up there and so that square of land in the upper right it was actually part of cambridge originally then west  cambridge was formed it was part of what is now arlington and then when belmont was formed belmont a part of arlington and it became current of belmont and then in eighteen eighty cambridge took it back again and so we've had a lot of swapping of land of the useless marshes of this piece of land here which which must have affected the farmer and i have to imagine that the farmer had an opinion about which town he wanted to be part of i would guess mr tudor also had an opinion too you know the founders of belmont were very concerned about the taxes supporting the rest of cambridge and and so i would imagine business people would would would have a concern all right so what happened after that in the late eight hundreds there were a lot of there was a lot of trouble developing there was a lot of pollution coming into the great swamp at that time it was pollution that was organic in nature and it was from the new or it was the storm water system and the sewer system come together near a waterway and when there's a lot of flooding they function in such a manner that sewerage ends up going directly into the into the rivers and i have some material to explain the engineering of that but i won't go into that right now as i'm talking but that resulted in in a lot of a lot of pollution and in order to deal with the stinking marshes after eight hundred seventy five there was this ditch that was drying up and then today it's actually a an underground conduit because that ditch itself got stinky and it got put underground i think in the one nine hundred eighty s and until maybe the hundred seventy so we had this reenact sation there was a very colorful language used between the harvard trained lawyers from belmont and cambridge in that petition by the mayor of cambridge elliott actually testified on behalf of belmont because he had done a lot of soil borings so this is the first i guess not the first time i've mentioned olmstead but i'm standing elliot we're at the forefront of landscape design and promoting the emerald necklace in the boston metro boston parks designed in that believe he'll be visiting you in the spring himself but elliott with his protege  and really cared a lot about this portion of cambridge especially around fresh pond but also around del wife brooke and and unfortunately elliot died on the early in one thousand nine hundred seven of  meningitis when i skipped over here is quite interesting and i'll show you on the next map they were so worried about their not just the quality of their fresh water supply but also the quantity that the cambridge water department was granted a right of way in order to take water from little pond to fresh pond in order to supply the citizens in cambridge with fresh water that was only used for about ten years time because of they subsequently found  reservoirs that they're now using in lincoln park in stony brook reservoirs but it was a long enough time that a right of way which still appears on deed restrictions all along the way  is granted to the cambridge water department who in the one nine hundred eighty s took that opportunity when a new building was going on concord ave to to to make it go the other way it's so flat around here that during one century it was tilted one way and now it's tilted the other way and some cambridge storm water goes underground on the same passageway that i'll show you on the next map right to wellington brook on its way to little river we're starting to have regional utilities so we've got the consolidation of the sewer and water metro boston and then we have a very interesting phenomenon and that is right at the turn of the century the ice industry collapses because of electrical situation no longer is the pure water of this area unique because you could just put any old water in an electric refrigerator and get ice cubes and with the ice industry the hay meadow industry collapsed hey hey was very valuable so even though the marsh was getting pretty smelly the waters were still flowing in the main reason they were flowing is that the hay farmers were dredging irrigation ditches in order to grow hay and when the hay industry collapsed they could no longer justify that annual investment in dredging  irrigation ditches for their profitable crop and that's when things really went south that's when the water became very very stagnant and that's when as you can see in one thousand and four there was a malaria epidemic in this be showing you a map of that and that was considered a sufficiently severe public health crisis that the state came in and said look you towns keep pickering in pointing fingers we've got a public health crisis here we've got malaria and it was it was an eminent domain taking to establish the ill wife work reservation and there were already plans in the works by frederick elliott to build a whole parkway but they said we've got to supersede those nice sounding parkway plans and take it for the sake of dredging the new little river and draining the swamp so that we can create what they envisioned is that they would create some useful farmland out of those useless marshes nonetheless the houston's family being an award winning farm was excluded from the taking and they had in fact out a permit to take your again water using a windmill from the new little river and it's because they were excluded from that taking of the l wife reservation that they remain private property today even though the owners of that real estate trust have been changing hands the name of it is on the record is still the same so let me try to show some of this in pictures this is the map that we looked at before but with that blue line added to show the conduit going from fresh pond to little pond i noticed that in green are one hundred percent of the roads in this area ok so there aren't a lot of roads most of the disease there marshland are farmland and i've had the pleasure of being joined by an impersonator frederick law olmstead the same one that will be visiting you in a few months time and this is a picture of him by little pond on one of the nature walks and he notes in this quote here that for every thousand dollars traditionally invested in the park  dividends to the second generation possessing it will be much larger than the first and the dividends to the third much larger than the second if you live to one hundred twenty one to one thousand and three and then his protege charles elliott was taking over but unfortunately died a handful of this map the pink map is shows the one thousand nine hundred four malaria epidemic there's a lot of detail that's impossible to read but suffice it to say that there was a pretty systematic study this is after william lyman underwood's one thousand one report that i've had contracted malaria yes or no and then they put little red dots on this map and i can show you a copy if you're curious now the farm doesn't have any red dots the farm was upland the night i don't know i guess they weren't victims of malaria but a lot of areas of north cambridge were so the conclusion was in one thousand nine hundred nine this blue area is the taking of land by the state and it's at an angle and a little bit difficult to parse but you can see i've got a little pond marked and that circle of belmont uplands is excluded from the blue taking and that narrow strip just below the red circle is all that they needed in order to dredge the new little river which exists today the new little r dredged in a location where for at least half of it there was a meandering brook through the marshes known as pickerel brook pickerel or cold water fish that need deep water so it must have been a fairly deep broke little river today is quite shallow and certainly couldn't support pickerel and the reason it's shallow is multifold a fold but mainly it's because today we have so much impervious surface but that's paved over everything that  diment gets washed and all of our rivers and streams of massachusetts are getting more and more shallow from the bottom up and therefore they're getting more and more warm and therefore different kinds of fish and other plants and creatures grow there but somehow all the other farmers weren't so lucky and they got their land taken or maybe they considered themselves lucky because they got money for land which was pretty useless including bertha brody's some richardson's  and in other names you might recognize across the top you can see the arlington in cambridge tell mine and here the belmont in cambridge town line so it's sort of a contentious area where three towns come together it's been designated as a national historic place i don't you know it's not a preservation restriction of any sort but as you drive on it you know enjoy the greenery on either side that was the whole point however when they were designing it they had horses and carriages and mine so that as you trotted by in your carriage you could glance left and glance right and see green instead of buildings right at your face they didn't imagine the speeding cars that we have today n l y for parkway we had the next wave of immigrants from armenia and russia coming in one thousand nine hundred twenty and with that next wave of immigrants there was a lot of nervousness about whether they would be coming into suburban towns like belmont and i find it quite ironic that in one thousand and twelve belmont was a dubious leader of sorts as the first town in massachusetts to adopt what was called the tenement house act these immigrants typically would live in triple decker such as you can still see in somerville and belmont didn't want the white boys so or they did the only one of the white boy and so they say in order to discourage low income residents the tenement house act said that you can't build triple deckers and so the reason i find it ironic is that today we have an affordable housing conflict with environmentalists and in belmont kind of snubbed affordable housing from very early days in hundred twelve and many other towns adopted the tenement house act subsequent to belmont doing so we had environmental challenges in one nine hundred fourteen as a recent book marks the last known passenger pigeon with died in captivity i find one of more interesting aspects of that story is that the passenger pigeon is a little bit of a side note but i'm sure they saw them on the belmont uplands and all around in huge huge flocks thousands of birds at a time they were easy to spot and they would go all over the country but with the advent of the telegraph it was easy for hunters to hop on the trains that were now in place and rush off and wipe them out for the profit that they got from the made in the feathers of the passenger pigeon so it was our technology at the time of the braille road in the telegraph that led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon in one nine hundred fourteen this unintended consequences and i'm sure there are more for the technologies we know of today but but let's let's try to learn from that time we had an influenza epidemic in one thousand eighteen as we enter flu season just a reminder it was particularly bad in that year and because of a growing understanding of germs and what was called the miasma theory of germs  we started to have zoning regulations for the first time in the one nine hundred twenty s those zoning regulations require the twenty five foot set back from the street to the structure on the property in order to provide sufficient air space for germs to die between a tenement house for instance and the street that you were walking on or riding your horse and carriage down or in that time the early cars so in fact the setbacks were something that taken they did get a deed restriction added to them saying that they could build a structure within twenty five feet of a boundary to the public park that was just taken next to them and the building that's proposed to be built there is exactly twenty five feet  sixty and this is a hint to the next seven decades the number of miles of paved streets and therefore driveways and you know for the sake of residences doubled between one hundred twenty nine hundred sixty from forty miles of paved streets  to eighty and i'll show you that shortly first let me just show you the population growth during this time it starts to get really steep around nineteen twenty and then it stays flat in the fifty's and sixty's and then it goes down as people move out to the suburbs with the arrival of one twenty eight and four ninety five and the ring roads for people to move away from the cities and now it's starting to go up again this  driving a lot about the land use scenario so i hope most of you know there's been a reassurance this year richard betts his book the streets of belmont and how they were named at the back of that book you'll see this chart where all he does is add up the number of miles of paved streets in belmont decade by decade and it follows the population path it goes up quite steeply and from  even in the area near the hughes to spar and there's the belmont uplands on the left there were proposals to replace farms with the residential district developments this is know three proposal for residential development that never got built but developers were already had dollar signs in their mind of hey if i subdivided this land and sell a bunch of plots i can make a lot more money as a developer of residential buildings than as of as a seller of farmland to a farmer who's competing with well established farmers in the midwest now but before i get to that photo in an article in one thousand nine hundred three and was very annoyed with the publisher who cropped it off and didn't show the other house on the right hand side of hill road which is going in between the two houses so in the text of that article you'll see reference to two houses but you only see one house in the picture unless you've got an insert in your newsletter from one thousand nine hundred three which you can still see if you go to the claflin room and look for it road what happens next highways and hurricanes is how i characterize it with the advent of the automobile there's interest in having paved roads conquered turnpike used to be conquered avenue but it got moved over to today's route too or it was then pond street in one thousand nine hundred thirty eight we had our last category five hurricanes in this area and it wiped out the commercial greenhouses in arlington and belmont for all those mart market gardeners who were wooden winning awards with the mess just sort of cultural society by then the midwestern farmers had established themselves had found very good land and it was no no longer worth it to rebuild those those greenhouses and that's when the sell off with a combination of the hurricane the competition with the midwest and the advent of the automobile and urban sprawl it really was much more profitable to build residential developments as and that insight also came from james o'connor's book that i have back there and he spoke to the belmont historical society about boston suburbs in general and belmont was no exception in the one nine hundred forty s and early fifty's various portions of that taking got sold off to develop present of questionable circumstances cambridge parked i drive a c p d for instance used to be part of cambridge the wife reservation and it's now has a story residential and office buildings on it and more going up and more plans for even hundred forty eight i should have corrected this it didn't get sold to george miles we got sold to a real estate development company george miles was the guy who was renting the house on the prop one of the houses on the property and both houses on the property actually got moved to hundred forty eight that was also a master plan for an inner ring road in addition to four ninety five and one twenty eight there was supposed to be a six ninety five that was to be thought of as an inner belt the highway in the tip o'neill area era subsequently in the one nine hundred seventy s the neighborhoods that would have been broken up by that inner beltway objected so strongly that that it never got built but if you're ever wondering why route two comes to a as it comes down the hill with its four lanes it's because they had in mind that you'd be entering a ring road at that point but there's a little bit more to that story which i'll get to shortly so  wasn't really a farm anymore but it was owned by real estate developer who sold it to arkadi little and the owners of the lineman farm which was the last farm in cambridge and and boarded the used to spar and were both sold to arthur d little company here say is that there was a homeless family living on the uplands in the fifty's who would wash their clothes in the river and just hang out in the in the house that remain there and that in there there was a bridge over little river still intact we had v station called russell field you have your grace to think because there was a whole plan to put a hotel and all sorts of buildings there but because of the a spouse to us and disturbing this soil causing pollution they had to seal it off and all they could do with it was an epileptic feel they'd like to show that off now but it was pretty drastic crisis that led to that conclusion in the fifty's we had double whammy hurricanes carol and diane were the names of the hurricanes and  should have served as a reminder of how valuable wetlands are but i'm not sure how much was understood about that at that time this is i'm going to move past this and get on to the one nine hundred sixty s where we have lots of building going on and regulations so in the one nine hundred sixty s the hill states was built on the south side of little river and i'll show you a picture from the hill estates of little river and the next slide with the extension of mass pike  the federal aid highway act we have an interesting story with route two so arlington was not happy about widening route two to get to one twenty eight in fact it went all the all the way to massachusetts spirit court and won however the next year governor volpi used emergency legislation claiming that route two was an evacuation route case of a nuclear attack and was able to widen it anyway and that's how it got wide at that time the culvert between spy plane and little palm upon it was still open there was a bridge over it but in one thousand sixty seven it got put underground into the that's there now and has never actively been maintained and because they all wife won't go into a culvert longer than thirty feet without turning around that was the end of alewife and spy pond one nine hundred sixty seven it was also at that time that those two homes from the farm that got moved to lake st they got taken because as we all know the small town of belmont has five exit ramps from route two and one of them took both houses  as far as i can tell at that point there was a huge dirt pile on the uplands property there are many who claim that it was it deposited there from route two construction i my suspicion is that if anything the upwind hill of the uplands was used to construct the route to overpass over lake street you know they have to build up the earth in order to to do that but there are various claims that there is debris nine related to affordable housing that was the passing of chapter forty b which is was used to eventually get to where we are today when there was that big pile of hill you know pile of dirt teenagers in the one nine hundred sevent used to hang out in and gain independence as it were and one of them shared with me this photograph from the hill estates of two boys on a styrofoam raft finn's style using their hockey sticks to row down a little river or as it was known by them rats creek or as it when known by others a different kind of creek with an s h star in it so it was it was probably not the highest quality water in but they had a good time in the summer and one of their family friends took this photograph you could notice the the cars the parking lot closer to the river than the  ones protection that act would currently allow and kind of clear land across the way the silver maple forest was not really a stablished at that time and  so it's if anyone of you has photographs from that era i'd be so curious because it was kind of a neglected area in the one nine hundred seventy s and ninety's eighty's and ninety's we get different kinds of pollution and we get this notion that we should have smart growth so we had some great legislation passed in the one nine hundred seventy sink looting the national clean water act of course it only came about as a result of things like love can and again extreme crisis is what causes us to take action the default behavior of us as a society is to build build build build build and reproduce reproduce reproduce our population pressures or  i wrote dane is a killer of anything with gills and it was purposefully put into spy pond in order to rid the pond of the carp and repopulate it with bass so fishermen could have game fish course it didn't just kill the car that killed everything with gills and it was kind of a disgusting mess that that summer the arsenic was dated from an earlier time than the seventy's the arsenic was used to for orchards for many decades  particularly the remembers of the large church in arlington reject were responsible for rejecting your proposal to extend the redline from alewife into arlington center they were dead set against that and so in the a the new e p a adopted what's called the national pollutant discharge elimination system nip these phase one for large cities and this year of two thousand and fourteen phase two for small cities is in draft form and subject to clear comment and heavily influenced by climate change which i'll get to so i claimed it's the one nine hundred ninety s when that silver maple forest really got established there were sober maples lining hill road and throughout the area but but they were really left alone to grow in the ninety's so i would say this is a satellite view of what we're talking about just as a reminder this is from the early two thousand and you can see our thirty little buildings on both sides of a compart drive now the lower side has been put back to open space as a result of a negotiation with the city of cambridge saying you can build taller buildings on the other side as long as you keep the pervious  surfaces and they still matter attention areas no worse than they are today and you can see that path has the beginnings of a meadow being reclaimed which is beautifully reclaimed no that used to be a parking lot as well so i can date this to around two thousand five i would guess in the middle of the forest there's the mother maple ten years ago with rather skinny trees around it and and those grew another ten years or another ten feet since then and where i get my walks on the north trail of avail wife reservation there's really an impressive collection of wildlife there it's at the end of a corridor that goes all the way into wealth him fisher were sighted this year at the wynn brook before school program for chicago and it's really a really neat place so we did start to have some citizen activism and say in the  eighty's i can only give you a sample it's not as easy for a lay person historian like myself to dig it all up but there was the citizen for ill wife coalition the citizens coalition  failed wife neighbors coalition for life it's like education like everybody needs their own initiative and there are lots of different groups but some of their key names are listed there the friends of  stabilization committee each of these organizations are very driven by the particular people leading them and what their health is like for instance my own organization about what citizens form was founded mainly about the mclean land issue at that time in one thousand nine nine hundred and and there are all sorts of citizens who cared a lot about this land in this area who are not affiliated with a particular group whether they're birdwatchers or are engineers who lived  worked in nearby buildings or just citizens in the two thousand is the coalition to preserve the belmont uplands was formed and in january of this year the freshman residence alliance was formed as new groups of citizens sort of wake up to the issues of this area several books were written and i have most of them back there so what are we learning no the two thousand and twelve ne climate change reality more water more storms more intense storms hotter temperatures sea level rise this is all affecting the whole northeast not just the uplands property uplands property as well know it will tell you that there's been a ten inch increase in sea level over the last hundred years largely due to increasing temperatures so i'm shifting gears here to climate change and how that effects land use and the use of land and water in our area what are the predicted impacts there are several that's the sea level rise in and here are the specific other ones by twenty one hundred one hundred years from now we're learning every day i think every month of this past year there's been a new scientific study out that specifically addresses what's happening in the northeast the mid latitudes between the equator and the poles are getting the most water and we're right right there because of the way the jet stream comes in to boston harbor so wide as sea level rise matter oh yeah we're protected by a dam we're protected by a dam and on our side of it there is a waterway that used to go all the way to fresh past belmont and what would it take to breach that dam so the charles river dam in the mystic river dam are both have a height of eleven point five five feet by this standard elevation measure and the army corps of engineers this is maybe ten or fifteen years ago studies hurricanes so that disaster preparedness groups can can plan evacuation routes and what to do in case of a disaster so they look at category one two three four hurricanes remember hundred thirty eight was a category five hurricane and they they know it's a big difference between storms that have a particular wind direction and storms that don't so they divide the world of storms and in those two columns that i have here so you know we're ok with the category one hurricane we're ok with a category two hurricane as long as it doesn't have the wrong wind direction once we get to category three and four landfall here we're in trouble from just a dam standpoint that there's not addressed the rain that comes down in increasing volumes now right and goes in the other direction we're talking about sea rise we're looking at this so this is you know we're we're still learning today and in fact the city of boston and the city of cambridge have gotten national as a result of hurricane sandy they've got national experts to be looking at the charles river and the mystic river for climate change or ability perking seen it wasn't that long ago and they loaned to her holder finding that it's quite complicated task to figure out what's going to happen and so they were going to issue some reports in june of this year they saw i think what's going to take us till november and now it's postponed until january of next year so we don't know what the results are yet so as we're learning about climate change we've got this fellow brian o'neill who owns the property until about july of this year come to find out so arthur de little had been in conversations with mr o'neill in  if with his property in watertown for reasons i don't fully understand before that came to any closure of that discussion they went bankrupt and just flat out sold their land to mr o'neil a local developer called bullfinch who has subsequently been developing an acorn park drive in the year two thousand he proposed building an r and d office park and after much debate the town of belmont rezoned the property from residential commercial so they could do that in mr o'neill signed a memorandum of understanding however by the time all of that was negotiated the commercial real estate market fell and that project was aband so in two thousand and four a luxury condo proposal came before town meeting and and mr o'neill said please get to rezone the back to residential thank you very much i'd like to build some luxury condos and the town rejected that proposal saying no we're ok with an office building that builds in tax revenue brings in tax revenue potentially but we're not ok with residential so there was a special committee formed by the board of selectmen and mr o'neill was approached with the possibility of a land swap saying please take one i'll show you on the next map some v c r land that used to be an ice skating rink and swap it and he said no thank you very much my lands much more valuable than the land you're trying to swap it with so he went ahead with the current proposal that in two thousand and five for forty be affordable housing development of two hundred ninety eight units in five four story building this sixty of those units are affordable which is the twenty percent he needs to meet all the requirements to override local zoning in two thousand and seven the belmont zoning board of appeals e p a granted a forty become prince a permit with forty two conditions on it and in two thousand and ten with the threat of a statewide vote to kill the forty bill b law the building permit application process began and after that he started getting various permits like he started the process of applying for the state highway access permit what are we talking about here is a map ok so the proposal there's a little pond with those nineteen seventies  houses too close to a little pond there's the hill states too close to little river and then there's his proposal which is in the process of moving forward on in the red circle and in the oval circle is that former ice skating rink in the one nine hundred fifty s i don't know if any of you remember and that road is called frontage road it is also thought of as an access road to route two which gets pretty backed up this little river here by the way has also a dotted line that's the old conduit that i talked about all the way to fresh pond it's defunct right now but in portions it was like a brick aqueduct like a like a roman aqueduct  k so that's what's on the table right now and looking at it a little sideways it's got five buildings a b c d e that's hard drive on the top it's got a driveway through the middle w buildings and on the left and right and i'm just going to try again to put this down to show you a little bit about it so if you look at building a i'll show you what it looks like from the street according to the plans so that's what they're looking to build there is five buildings that look like that resolutions but they have felt hamstrung by the forty be law because we're only at two or three percent affordable housing unless you're at ten percent a community can't really do much about forty b without being sued  our conservation commission denied the environmental permit because they didn't think it met storm water regulations that got appealed and eventually terminated in march of two thousand and thirteen we started learning a lot more about storm water and flooding and pass by law in the next month in town meeting and in addition to the conservation commission this group called the coalition to preserve the belmont u appealed the permitting of this and they were denied their appeal they were denied standing for their appeal in september of last year there have been at least two attempts now to try  to purchase the land but for some you know for some that could be raised but but you could make so much more money with two hundred ninety eight units even with sixty of them affordable that doesn't make economic sense for him so that was the belmont legislative actions cambridge has done a number of different things including quite recently they they make declarations about opposing the development they did not allow the sewer hookup directly to cambridge so therefore the current proposal is to go all the way around a little pond to earth to the belmont system which then goes into the cambridge system anyway there was an invitation that mark polo as the chair of the belmont selectman accepted talk with the city council environmental committee and various you know if thank you and i mention the vulnerability analysis and just last month there was a policy order to seek out a purchase opportunity but arlington belmont in cambridge with the arlington cambridge both said actually if we have money for open space this is not our top priority we've got the new guard property in arlington another they're up to need some cambridge thank you very much belmont said if there was a purchase opportunity i e if there was someone at the other end of the table to deal with the they would look at having a conversation about it but every attempt has been rejected to have that conversation and that policy order last month from cambridge also requested that d c are taken to a consideration climate change reality before issuing a conservation restriction on the land that's not being built and d c are declined that opportunity so i came i'm actually going to skip over this next section which is just a nearby development it's what's happening on the former three little property in the interest of time because of but this these are before and after pictures i'd be happy to go over with anyone who's interested the arthur d little property and some pretty nice stuff that's happening to reclaim parking lots with vegetation looked at from different directions at the state level  you know we do have nipped these phase two in two thousand and eight we have the global warming solutions act and it's been very slow to result in any thing actually changing that would affect us this property of the global warming solutions act is mainly focused on  reducing greenhouse emissions to prevent came quite a change from getting worse but it does include some adaptation measures around storm water in the coastal areas of massachusetts twice our senator  first representative and then senator brown's burger has gotten through the legislator later the state legislature a bond bill to allow six million dollars to be bonded towards the acquisition of the solar make a forest but the first time governor patrick vetoed it outright and the second time he pocket vetoed it and but did allow an appraisal to happen in the appraisal in two thousand and eleven was at thirteen point five million dollars a daunting number amount of money to raise even with a public private partnership and probably half of what some developers would claim you could make off of this property as a as a development so in two thousand and twelve these permits that are required of started getting issued the sewer extension connection permit was issued by the department of environmental protection we do have state action that just happened this year called the water infrastructure bill to start to recognize that we have a crumbling infrastructure for fresh water waste water and storm water but a lot of this stuff is too late for this particular development and besides belmont cambridge and the state there are various regional bodies like the metropolitan area planning council the tri community flooding board that are trying to have sort of a middle sized group cooperating but so far that hasn't result in anything so goes down because the mill your heart dam folks pump it out to the ocean to make room for the storm but you can see on that date of that photograph i want above three inches and then three feet and so that's that's why it flooded i could give a whole separate talk of what's happened this year you won't be able to read this but i have been trying to notify the board of selectmen about climate change i've been trying storm the state only requires the one hundred year storm to be estimated using data that's fifty years old in i've been trying to bring that to lots of people's attention and on this particular site the proposed development will have an additional one hundred fifty thousand gallons of water that's unaccounted for by any state regulations and no one feels seems to feel authorized to do anything about that the they say well you know too late the regulations are what they are and i know you're telling me that climate change is happening but you know  i've got to let the bureaucracy go at its pace in it's too late for this particular development so you probably several of you have seen these paper articles this week the last these last two weeks about various protests and vigils there have been thirteen people arrested two people on a hunger strike the trees all got cut down as i mentioned at the beginning of the talk and it's been very colorful there's been a request for an injunction to stop the development and that prompted  hearing with the judge and in the few days between the hearing and when the judge actually ruled most of the trees got cut down and then the judge put it in place for twenty four hours and then dismissed it last tuesday  grounds that it had a low probability of success and there are various details around the grounds for that but to tell the word in pictures on june twenty eighth there was this wonderful rally in parade with still dancers and puppets  that green puppet installed dancer appeared the green puppet appeared in a parade on october twelfth in the still the answer was all dressed in black in mourning in in that same  problems of the parade i mentioned included the two still dancers this is the other one it included a representative of the owner which is now prevention real estate investors  a guy with a chainsaw or chopping down people dressed up as fish and trees but the reality is that pink tree that's by one of the buildings that i showed on the other s one of only a few left on the right as is what it looked like a week ago so so the chopping down of the trees is very sad but i will leave you with a couple of slides here just  to say that this is a privately owned property it is next to a park reservation but by studying it it gives us a quite a window into our local history in our regional history  the use of land and water other than a few cart paths for one hundred years of farming and maybe a pile of dirt added in the one nine hundred sixty s i'm not sure it's mostly been left to nature and it's been providing floodplain forest habitat with these seventy foot trees on growth that's just a little bit higher the upland is only five or fifteen feet higher than the surrounding wetlands and it's always been like that it was williams island in the middle of the marsh in the seventeenth hundreds as a result of the surrounding developments the l y park sub watershed is now forty seven percent impervious ten percent you start to affect fish health we're not as bad as somerville which is more like seventy eight percent they have asphalt backyards in many cases for instance but forty seven percent pretty bad and so we need to find ways to break up the pavement and increase open space and it's very discouraging to think that this particular property will will be impervious they do have you know they have passed  all i mean it's under dispute but they claim that the storm water retention basin that they have underneath these buildings is sufficient to meet all the regulations for the fifty year old estimate of the hundred year storm as required but the climate  the northeast is clearly changing and in the sea is rising and hurricanes are getting increasingly frequent and in more intense and by this month that we're in now the citizen advocacy had reached a fervor that resulted  n almost daily protests and pleas and parades and even hunger strikes and these thirteen arrests but it does not appear to have had much effect legislatively there is as you can see in the back of an event next tuesday where scientists are presenting to a cambridge committee on public health and safety at three o'clock on tuesday that's the next thing i know about but also by this month there were enough permits obtained that the new owners as of july or august it's pretend trial that they felt like they could cut down the tree despite the fact that in fact belmont has not issued a building permit yet and it's disputed whether they needed one to cut down the trees but the fact is that they have cut down the trees but it's still pervious and so there's still a lot of activism around keeping it pervious perhaps as a conservation area and it's fairly clear to me that the regulations are not keeping up with the reality of climate change and that increases in impervious surface are problematic one good thing that happened is the belmont border select men approved regulations that incorporate up today climate change date about rain on september twenty ninth so for instance this winter any duplex tear down and put a big place they're going to be required to handle storm water so there's a little bit of good news there that it's disputed whether that those regulations apply to this property or not on the one side they say well these are local regulations and forty b allows you to override local regulations on the other side wishing these aren't really your typical local nimby not in not in my backyard kind of regulation we pass the storm order by law because of federally p a regulations and so this should be considered a federal thing and not a local thing that forty be overrules we'll see where that dispute goes but clearly finding ways in some way to preserve remaining open space with or without trees is more valuable than ever before so i encourage us all to learn from the past since there is no plan b if we mess it up planted in trouble there is no plan b so i would like to think the historical society and all the others listed here who provided a lot of information and for for this talk many of the books are in the back there are a lot of additional sources i could tell you about and more there is that event on tuesday at three o'clock there's more about that in the back and and as we're doing any q and a l i'll just leave you with the not just the