A NEIGHBORHOOD is made, not found
1925
Long before the Greenway, this was
one of East Boston’s great working
rail yards.
Here, trains carried coal, lumber,
grain, oil, and other goods between
the shipyards of Boston Harbor and
the continent. The railroad made
East Boston an industrial link
between the city and the wider
world.
When the railroad era passed, the
tracks were abandoned. Where
others saw land left behind,
neighbors saw a path forward
1969
An East Boston teacher points to a map
of an expanding Logan Airport—and
speaks for the neighborhood beyond its
fences.
Mary Ellen Welch would spend the next
fifty years doing exactly that: bringing
East Boston into the rooms where its
future was decided. She organized
residents, demanded that they be heard,
and built the relationships that made
lasting change possible.
She later helped found the East Boston
Greenway Council and reclaim this
abandoned rail corridor for the public.
Today
This corridor is alive again.
People walk to the Blue Line, ride bicycles beneath
the trees, gather with neighbors, and move through
a part of East Boston once divided by an
abandoned rail corridor.
Today, Massport manages both Logan Airport—our
region’s great threshold to the world—and much of
this treasured Greenway, a precious shared
passage through East Boston itself.
Mary Ellen Welch’s legacy is more than the path
beneath your feet. It is the belief that a neighbor
does not simply live in a place.
A neighbor helps shape what it becomes.