The park sat along the eastern waterfront, and in the decades after its construction in 1896 it served as the recreational and cultural hub of East Boston. As resident Anne L. Magnasco said in 1997, it was a “second home” for kids in Eastie during the Great Depression, with teens gathering to “swim and sit and smoke and eat potato chips.” Her memories are preserved in Northeastern University’s library as part of an oral history project on Wood Island.
The park was vast. “You could really get lost in Wood Island Park,” Magnasco said. She met her husband Emillio on the beach in Wood Island.
“I never said two words to him,” she said. “But going to the beach, we’d get very friendly.”
In the 1950s, Boston’s Logan Airport — opened in 1923 — was rapidly growing. Commercial flights were taking off across the country, and there was more demand for air travel than ever. In 1956, the state created the Massachusetts Port Authority, commonly known as Massport, to oversee airport operations and rapidly expand flight capacity. Massport used landfill to build up shallow areas along the coast.
“This was a sign of modernity,” said Jim Aloisi, a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation and author of the book “Massport at 60: Shaping the Future Since 1956.” “An international airport that was responding to the jet age — it was very sexy. It was very exciting in that moment.”
Massport officials believed they were justified in expanding. As they explained in a 1969 report, making the airport larger was part of an effort “to help guarantee that New England retains its reputation as the ‘Hub of the Commercial Universe’.”
Today, Logan is among the nation’s 20 busiest airports and is a major economic engine for the commonwealth. According to Massport, Logan generates more than $16 billion in regional economic benefits, supporting more than 160,000 direct and indirect jobs — with roughly 5,000 badged Logan employees living in East Boston, Revere, Chelsea and the surrounding communities.
What couldn’t have been fully understood at the time of the airport’s expansion, Aloisi says, is how the move would also hurt East Boston in the ensuing years. Unlike most major airports, Logan remains located within the heart of a city neighborhood, which is still home to thousands of residents.
“These things were happening at a time when people were not constrained by the law,” Aloisi said. “After the 1970s, they would be constrained by the EPA, by the National Environmental Protection Act, by the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act.”
In short, Massport — perhaps unwittingly — put planes over people, a philosophy that came to a head with the destruction of Wood Island Park in 1967.